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

7 страница из 70

I found that this “gipsy-man” had been a Sunday-school scholar, but somehow or other—he did not seem desirous of saying how—he got among a gang of gipsies in early life. He left his praying mother for the life of a vagabond among tramps, with a relish for hedgehogs, snails, and diseased pork. He said he liked hedgehog-pie better than any other food in the world. “Two hedgehogs will make a good pie,” he said. He also said that he was once with a tribe of gipsy tramps, and he laid a wager that he “could make them all sick of hedgehogs.” They told him he could not. The result was he set off to a place he well knew in the neighbourhood and caught twenty-one hedgehogs. These were all cooked, some in clay and others turned into soup, and all the gipsies who ate them “were made sick, excepting an old woman of the name of Smith.”

He next told me how to cook snails, which he liked very much, and wished he had a dish before him then. The snails, he said, “were boiled, and then put in salt and water, after which they were boiled again, and then were ready for eating.” Feeling desirous of changing the subject, I reverted to his Sunday-school experience, and asked if he could remember anything he once read (he could not now read a sentence) or sung. All he could remember, he said, was “In my father’s house are many mansions,” and a bit of a song—