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

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“Merrily, merrily, onward we go.”

The five minutes’ trotting down the hill with this youthful encouraging band brought my forty years’ joyous and soul-saving episodes of Sunday-school life vividly before me, which had the soothing effect of temporarily shaking off my late hour’s experiences with the gipsies, and causing my heart to dance for joy.

A little later on I took the main road to High Beach and the “Robin Hood.” I had not got far upon the way before I was accosted by three semi-drunken, “respectable”-looking roughs, asking all sorts of insulting questions; and because I could not point them to a “California,” but rather to a “Bedlam,” I really thought that I should have to “lookout for squalls.” They began in earnest to close round me. By a little manœuvring, and the fortunate appearance of two or three gentlemen, I eluded their clutches.

The road up the hill to the “Robin Hood” was literally crowded with travellers, foolish and gay; cabs and carriages teemed with passengers of the gentle and simple sort, roughs and riffraff, went puffing and panting along. There were the thick and thin, tall and short, weak and strong, all jostling together as on Bank Holidays. I could hardly realize the fact that it was an English Sunday. In one trap, drawn by a poor bony animal scarcely able to crawl, there were fifteen men, women, and children, shouting and screaming as if it were a fair day—wild, mad, and frantic with swill to their heart’s core. The gipsies were in full swing. There were no less than fifty horses and donkeys running, galloping, trotting, and walking, with men, women, and children upon their backs. Half-tipsy girls seemed to have lost all sense of modesty and shame. The long sticks of the gipsies laid heavily upon the bones of the poor animals set the women and girls “a-screeching” and shouting, sounds which did not rise very high before they were turned into God’s curses.