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

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I bade my friends the gipsies good-bye and, after giving the poor crippled boy something to please him, I started to go to the station, but found out that I should have an hour to wait. I therefore turned into a Wesleyan Chapel to enjoy a partial service, at the close of which the choir and the congregation, including a gipsy Smith and his wife, sung with tear-fetching expression and feeling—

“Jerusalem my happy home,

Name ever dear to me;

When shall my labours have an end,

In joy and peace with thee?”

After this impressive service time, steam and “shanks’s pony” carried and wafted me back to my friends in Victoria Park, none the worse for my Sunday ramble among the gipsies.

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After being kept in bed at a friend’s house by pain and prostration for forty hours, it was pleasant to tramp upon the green, mossy sward of Nature in Victoria Park on a bright Easter Monday morning, with the sun winking and blinking in my face through the trees on my way to the station in the midst of a throng of busy holiday-seekers, dressed in their best clothes, with all the variety of colour and fashion that can only be seen on a bank-holiday. The fashions worn by the ladies ranged from the reign of Queen Anne to that of the latest fantasy under our good Queen Victoria, with plenty of room for digression and varieties according to the individual taste and vagary. Some of the ladies’ pretty faces were not without colour which makes “beautiful for ever.” There were others who might almost claim relationship to Shetland ponies, for their hair hung over their foreheads, covering their “witching eyes,” making them like two-year old colts, and as if they were ashamed to show the noble foreheads God had given them. Others were walking on stilts, evidently with much discomfort, and with both eyes shut to the injury they were inflicting upon their delicate frames and constitutions. This class of young ladies evidently thought that high heels, pretty ankles, and small feet, with plenty of giggle and bosh, were the things to “trap ’em and catch ’em.” Poor things! they are terribly mistaken on this point. The things to “trap ’em and catch ’em” are graceful action, modest reserve, soft looks, a heart full of sympathy, tenderness, goodness, and kindness. Few young men can withstand these “fireworks.” These are the things which make “beautiful for ever.”