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 soon found out that he was the “old fool” of the show, with which he was connected, and was known among his fraternity as “Old Bones,” although he did not seem to be over twenty years old. His salary for being the “old fool,” young fool, a fool to himself, and a fool for everybody, was four shillings a week and his “tommy,” or “grub,” which, as he said, was “not very delicious” at all times. I asked “Old Bones” why he was nicknamed “Old Bones.” He said, “Because some of our chaps saw me riding upon an old bony horse one day, with its bones sticking up enough to cut you through, and the more I wolloped it the more it stuck fast and would not go.” When I heard this, one of the ditties I know in the days of my child slavery in the brickfield came up as green as ever—

“If I had a donkey and it would not go,

Must I wollop it? No, no, no!”

“Our chaps,” said Bones, “laughed at me. I had to dismount and let the brute take its chance; and from that day I have been named ‘Old Bones.’” “I’m not very old, am I?” he said, and began to kick about on the ground. But I would not let him go, for I wanted to learn something of his antecedents. He had been a gutta percha shoemaker, and could earn his pound or more per week, but preferred to tramp the country as an “old fool,” live on red herrings, dress in rags, and sleep on straw under the stage. Before he had quite finished his story, another man, dressed in a suit of dirty, greasy, seedy-looking, threadbare, worn-out West of England black cloth, joined us. “Old Bones,” after a good shake of the hand, vanished to his show, red herrings, and “quid of baccy,” and I was left alone with my second acquaintance. I was not long in finding out, according to his statement, that he was a “converted Jew,” and had been to the “Cape” and lost £5000 in the diamond fields, and had come home to “pull up” again, instead of which, he had gone from bad to worse, and was now tramping the country with an old showman as a “fire king,” and sleeping under the stage among old boxes, rags, and straw. His real name was —, but was passing through the world as W—. Strange to say, I knew his brother-in-law, who is a leading man in one of the large English towns.