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

3 страница из 70

After climbing the steep and rugged hill, I made my way to find out a cocoa-nut gambler, who once gave me an invitation to call upon him when I happened to pass that way. With much ado and many inquiries I found the man and his wife just preparing to go with a donkey and a heavy load of nuts to some secluded spot a few miles away, to “pick up a little money” for their “wittles.” My visit having ended in moonshine, I now began in earnest to hunt up the gipsies. A few minutes’ wandering among the bushes and by-lanes brought me upon a group of half-starved, dirty, half-naked, lost little gipsy children, who were carrying sticks to their wretched dwellings, which were nothing better than horribly stinking, sickening, muddy wigwams.

On making my way through mud and sink-gutter filth, almost over “boot-tops,” I came upon a duelling which, were I to live to the age of Methuselah, I could never forget.

Sitting upon an old three-legged chair, and with a bottom composed of old rags, cord, and broken rushes, was a bulky, dirty, greasy, idle-looking fellow, who might never have been washed in his life. I put a few questions to him about the weather and other trifling matters; but the answers I got from him were such that I could not understand. To “roker” Romany was a thing he could not do. Mumble and grumble were his scholastic attainments.