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

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The success of this plan for dealing with juvenile criminals makes it evident that a wise statesmanlike plan of educating the gipsy children would turn them into respectable and useful members of society, instead of their growing up to make society their prey.

To come back to the gipsies upon the “Flats,” I bade my friend good-bye, and began in earnest to carry out the object of my visit.

I had not been long on the ground—marshy flats—before I saw a young man scampering off to a tumble-down show with a loaf of bread and two red herrings in his arms. He had no hat upon his head, and his hair was cut short. His face was bloated, presenting a piebald appearance of red, white, and black, with a few blotches into the bargain. His foolish colouring paint, jokes, and antics had dyed his skin, stained his conscience, and blackened his heart. His clothing consisted of part of a filthy ragged shirt and a pair of patched and ragged breeches. They looked as if the owner and the tailor were combined in one being, and that the one who stood before me. The stitches in his breeches could not have presented a stranger appearance if they had been worked and made with a cobbler’s awl and a “tackening end.” His boots in better days might have done duty in a drawing-room, but were now transformed. With a laugh and a joke I captured my new friend, and notwithstanding that he had his dinner in his arms, we entered into a long chat together.