Читать книгу I've been a Gipsying. Rambles among our Gipsies and their children in their tents and vans онлайн

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Upon the forest, on God’s day of rest, there were no fewer than from five hundred to one thousand gipsy children, not a dozen of whom could read and write a sentence, or had ever been in a place of worship.

In going to my friend’s, the house-dwelling gipsy, for tea, in response to his kind invitation, that we might have a chat together, I called to see a gipsy woman of the name of B— whom I knew, as I also did her parents, who had recently come to live in the place. When I arrived at the wretched, miserable, dirty abode, I found that her gipsy husband had been sent for, and was now “doing fourteen years”—for what offence I did not attempt to find out—and that his place had been filled by another idle scamp; and, if reports be true, he has also been sent for “to do double duty,” and whose place also has been filled up in the social circle with another gipsy. This gipsy woman has entered into a fourth alliance, and, as one of the gipsies recently said, she has really been “churched” this time. I saw much, smelt a deal, but said little; and, after giving the poor child of six a trifle, I made haste to join my friends the gipsies at tea.