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

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For a few minutes I stood in meditation and wonder, while the crowds of gipsies were pursuing their work in fortune-telling and at the swings, cocoa-nuts, donkey-riding, steam horses, &c. One young fellow I saw among the gipsies was not of gipsy birth or gipsy extraction. It was quite evident from his manner and tattered, black cloth dress, that the young man was nearly at the bottom of a slippery inclined plane. His figure brought to me a familiar scene of some twenty-five years ago, and with which I was well acquainted. The young man reminded me of the only son of a Methodist local preacher who had had the sole management of extensive earthenware works in the — for a long term of years, and was highly respected in the district. The young man had been petted and almost idolized. This only son was highly educated, and in every way was being prepared to take his father’s place at the works some day. His sisters worked carpet slippers for him, and his mother warmed them before he went to bed; and “good-nights” were given in the midst of loving embraces, prayers, and kisses. Oftentimes they were given and said while tears of thankfulness to God for having given them, as they thought, a son who was to give them comfort, solace, and pride as they toddled down the hill together, while the shades of evening gathered round them. Every one in this Christian household thought no labour in winter or summer, night or day, too much to be bestowed upon their darling son. Alas! alas! this idolized boy, for whom thousands of prayers had been offered to Heaven on his behalf, in an evil hour ceased to pray for himself, and took the wrong turning or “sharp round to the left,” and the last I heard of him was that he had fallen in with a gang of gipsies, ended his days as a vagabond in a union in Yorkshire, and had brought his parents with their early grey hairs in sorrow to the grave. His loving sisters to-day are scattered to the winds. These recollections brought tears to my eyes and a deep, deep sigh from the bottom of my heart.