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

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“Here we suffer grief and pain,

Here we meet to part again;

In heaven we part no more.

Oh! that will be joyful.”

My heart bled, and I felt that I could have wept tears of sorrow as I sat in the midst of this family of our present-day gipsies. In these two tumble-down wooden dwellings there were two men and three women and twelve children growing up in the densest ignorance, barbarism, and sin.

I gave the mother and children some money wherewith to buy some food, and I left them with gratitude beaming out of their dirty faces. In going down the hill, a couple of hundred yards from this hotbed of sin, iniquity, and wretchedness, I came upon a party of about one hundred and fifty beautifully dressed and happy Sunday-school children tripping along joyfully with their teachers by their side to an afternoon service in the church close by. I could almost imagine them to be singing as I looked into their cheery faces, and nothing would have given me greater pleasure than to have sung out with them lustily—