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

14 страница из 70

“I then joined a gang of gipsies of the name of Lee, and with them I have lied, lived, stole, and slept, more like a dog than a human being. I used to run donkeys all day, and when the old woman came home from fortune-telling she would give me two pieces of bread and butter from somebody’s table for my dinner and tea which some of the servant girls had given to her. Among the gipsies I used to be reckoned the very devil. I have fought hundreds of times, and was never beaten in my life. The time when I was more nearly beaten than any other was with my brother-in-law, a gipsy. We fought hard and fast, up and down, for nearly an hour, and then we gave it up as both of us being as good as each other. I have had both my arms broken, legs broken, shoulder-blades broken, and kicked over my head till I have been senseless, in gipsy rows. Oh! sir, I could tell you a lot more, and I will do so sometime.”

This terrible recital of facts—of the cruelty, hardships, wrong-doing of present-day gipsy life—almost caused my hair to stand on an end whilst he related the horrors of backwood and daylight gipsyism in our midst.