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

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At the door stood a poor, old, worn-out pony, which they said was as “dodgy and crafty as any human being. It was a capital animal in a cart, but would not run at fairs with children on its back. Immediately you put a child upon its back it stood like a rock, and the devil could not move it.”

In the room were five children as ragged as wild goats, as filthy as pigs, and quite as ignorant. On an old “squab bed”—the only bed in the room—sat a big, fat, aged gipsy woman, on a par with the man and children. A young gipsy of about eighteen years stood at the bottom of the squab bed enjoying his Sunday dinner. In one hand he held the dirty plate, and the other had to do duty in place of a knife and fork. Of what the dinner was composed I could not imagine. It seemed to be a kind of mixture between meat, soup, fish, broth, roast and fry, thickened with bones and flavoured with snails and bread. Upon a very rickety stool sat a girl with a dirty bare bosom suckling a poor emaciated baby, whose father nobody seemed to know—and, if report be true, the less that is said about paternity the better. In this one little hole, with a boarded floor, covered with dirt and mud at least half an inch thick, one bed teeming with vermin, which I saw with my own eyes, and walls covered with greasy grime, there were a man, woman, girl, young man, and five children, huddling together on a Christian Sabbath, in Christian England, within a stone’s throw of a Christian Church and the Church of England day and Sunday school. None of them had ever been in a day or Sunday school or place of worship in their lives. They were as truly heathens as the most heathenish in the world, and as black as the blackest beings I have ever seen. The only godly ray manifest in this dark abode was that of gratitude and thankfulness. A pleasing trait is this. It was a vein embedded in their nature that only required the touch of sympathy, brotherhood, and kindness to light up the lives of these poor lost creatures living in darkness. Natural beauty I saw none inside; but the marks of sin were everywhere manifest. Just outside this miserable hive, notwithstanding the stench, the bees were buzzing about seeking in vain for honey, the butterflies were winging fruitlessly about trying to find flowers to settle upon; and across the beautiful forest valley the cuckoo was among the trees piping forth its ever beautiful, lovely, enchanting, and never-tiring “cuck-coo,” “cuck-coo,” “cuck-coo;” throstles, linnets, blackbirds, and woodpeckers were hopping about from tree to tree within a stone’s throw, sending forth heavenly strains, echoing and re-echoing in the distance among the wood foliage on this bright spring Sunday afternoon. I could almost hear with Dr. James Hamilton, in his “Pearl of Parables” (Sunday at Home, 1878), a poor gipsy girl singing with tears in her eyes—