Transcribed from the J. B. Lippincott edition by David Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org

THE
GYPSY’S PARSON

HIS EXPERIENCES AND ADVENTURES

BY

The Rev. GEORGE HALL

RECTOR OF RUCKLAND, LINCOLNSHIRE

ILLUSTRATED

PHILADELPHIA
J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY

London: SAMPSON LOW, MARSTON & CO. LTD.

TO
MY WIFE
MY COMPANION
ON MANY A GYPSY-JAUNT

“They cast the glamour o’er him.”

“You must forgive us. We are barbarians. . . . We are ruffians of the sun . . . and we must be forgiven everything.”

“It is easy to forgive in the sun,” Domini said.

“Madame, it is impossible to be anything but lenient in the sun. That is my experience. . . . But, as I was saying, the sun teaches one a lesson of charity. When I first came to live in Africa in the midst of the sand-rascals—eh, Madame, I suppose as a priest I ought to have been shocked by their goings-on. And, indeed I tried to be, I conscientiously did my best, but it was no good. I couldn’t be shocked. The sunshine drove it all out of me. I could only say, ‘It is not for me to question le bon Dieu, and le bon Dieu has created these people and set them here in the sand to behave as they do. What is my business? I can’t convert them. I can’t change their morals—I must just be a friend to them, cheer them up in their sorrows, give them a bit if they’re starving, doctor them a little—I’m a first-rate hand at making an Arab take a pill or a powder—when they are ill, and I make them at home with the white marabout.’ That’s what the sun has taught me, and every sand-rascal and sand-rascal’s child in Amara is a friend of mine.”

“You are fond of the Arabs, then?” she said.

“Of course I am, Madame. I can speak their language, and I’m as much at home in their tents, and more, than I ever should be at the Vatican—with all respect to the Holy Father.”

(Conversation between Domini and Father Beret in The Garden of Allah, quoted here by the kind permission of Mr. Robert Hichens.)

PREFACE

Not a few writers have essayed to study the Gypsies in dusty libraries. I have companioned with them on fell and common, racecourse and fairground, on the turfy wayside and in the city’s heart. In my book, which is a record of actual experiences, I have tried to present the Gypsies just as I have found them, without minimising their faults or magnifying their virtues. Most of the Gypsies mentioned in the following pages have now passed away, and of those who remain, many have, for obvious reasons, been renamed.

For the majority of the pictures adorning my book, I owe a profound debt of gratitude to my friend, Mr. Fred Shaw; also, for their kind permission to include several pictures in my “Romany Gallery,” my cordial thanks are due to Mrs. Johnson, of Yatton, Rev. H. H. Malleson, Mr. William Ferguson, Mr. T. J. Lewis, Mr. H. Stimpson, and Mr. F. Wilkinson.

The phonetics contained in this work are based upon a system invented by my friend, Mr. R. A. Scott Macfie, of the Gypsy Lore Society, whose innumerable kindnesses I most gratefully acknowledge.

G. H.

Ruckland Rectory,
near Louth,
Lincolnshire.

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

CHAPTER I
GYPSY COURT—MY INITIATION INTO GYPSYDOM

A TANGLE of sequestered streets lying around a triple-towered cathedral; red roofs and gables massed under the ramparts of an ancient castle; a grey Roman arch lit up every spring-time by the wallflower’s mimic gold; an old-world Bailgate over whose tavern yards drifted the sleepy music of the minster chimes; a crooked by-lane leading down to a wide common loved by the winds of heaven—these were the surroundings of my childhood’s home in that hilltop portion of Lincoln which has never quite thrown off its medieval drowsiness.

Not far from my father’s doorstep, as you looked towards the common, lay a narrow court lined with poor tenements, and terminating in a bare yard bounded by a squat wall. Every detail of this alley stands out in my memory with the sharpness of a photograph; the cramped perspective of the place as you entered it from our lane, the dreary-looking houses with their mud-floored living-rooms fronting upon the roadway, the paintless doors and windows, the blackened chimneys showing rakish against the sky, all combined to make a picture of dun-coloured misery. There were, it is true, a few redeeming features gilding the prevailing drabness of the scene. The entrance to the court had a southerly outlook upon green fields stretching up to the verge of the Castle Dyking, or, to revive its more gruesome name, “Hangman’s Ditch,” so called from the grim associations of a bygone day. From these fields a clean air blew through the court, rendering it a less unwholesome haunt for the strange folk who dwelt within its precincts; while not half a mile distant lay the breezy common, a glorious playground for the children of Upper Lincoln.

Seeing that this court and its denizens were destined in the order of things to make a profound impression upon my childish imagination, I may as well develop the picture rising so vividly before my mind’s eye.

It was somewhere in the fifties of the last century, a few years, that is to say, before my entrance into the world, that several families of dark-featured “travellers” had pitched upon the court for their Gypsyry, a proceeding at which our quiet lane at first shrugged its shoulders, then focussed an interested gaze upon the intruders and their ways, and finally lapsed into an indulgent toleration of them. Thus from day to day throughout my early years, there might have been seen emerging from the recesses of Gypsy Court swarthy men in twos and threes accompanied by the poacher’s useful lurcher; nut-brown girls with their black hair carelessly caught up in orange or crimson kerchiefs; wrinkled crones smoking short clays, as gaily they drove forth in their rickety donkey-carts; buxom mothers carrying babies slung, Indian fashion, across their shoulders, and bearing on their arms baskets replete with pegs, skewers, and small tin-ware of home manufacture. As for children, troops of the brown imps were generally in evidence, their eldritch shrieks rending the air between the portals of the little court and the gate opening upon the common.

No observes could possibly miss the fighting scenes and the ringing shouts which made the court echo again. A passionate folk are the Gypsies, a provoking word being at any time sufficient to call forth a blow. Even as I write these words, visions of gory fists and faces obtrude themselves through the mists of past days.

However, the Gypsies were never reported to be otherwise than polite towards the outsider who ventured into the alley. Diplomats rather than hooligans were they. “Let’s ’eave ’alf a brick at ’im,” is not the Gypsy’s way with a stranger who happens to stroll into the camp. At the same time I would not have it imagined that the inhabitants of the squalid court were of the best black Romany breed; far from it, they were mostly of diluted blood, else how came they to turn sedentary at all? For pure Gypsies (or Romanitshelaw, as they call themselves), the aristocrats of their race, abhor settled life, preferring to die on the road rather than wither inside four walls.

On the occasion of a horse fair in the city, our lane would resound with the clanging of hoofs beyond the ordinary, and in front of the taverns there was much rattling of whipstocks on the insides of hard hats, in order to enliven some weedy “screw,” and so reward its owner for hours of patient “doctoring” in a corner well screened from prying eyes. Then when the autumnal rains set in, and the leaves began to flutter down in showers, there would come from afar the rumbling of Romany “homes on wheels,” driven townwards by the oncoming of winter. To me it was always a saddening sight to watch the travel-stained wanderers hying to their winter quarters through miry streets heavy with mist and gloom. Staruben sî gav (town is a prison), an ancient vagabond was heard to remark on a like occasion.

A spectacle far more inspiriting was the departure of a Gypsy cavalcade from the city on a gay spring morning. For into the dingy purlieus where the travellers had wintered more or less cheerlessly, stray sunbeams and soft airs had begun to penetrate. Tidings had reached them that away in the open something had stirred, or called, or breathed along the furzy lanes and among the tree boughs, and forthwith every Romany sojourner within the ash-strewn yards of the city became eager to resume the free, roving life of the roads. How often have I longed for the brush of an artist to depict the company of merry Gypsies—men, women, and bairns, horses, dogs, and donkeys, jingling pot-carts and living-wagons bedizened with new paint, starting from the top of our lane for the open country, just when the wind-rocked woods were burgeoning and every green hedge-bottom had a sprinkling of purple violets.

Now until my eleventh year I had seen no more than the mere outside of Romany life, and I might never have had any Gypsy experiences to relate but for a trivial blood-spilling, which, as I look back upon it, may well be called my initiation into Gypsydom. Indeed, the small incident I am about to mention had for me a most important result, insomuch as it made me akin to Gypsies for the rest of my life.

My earliest schools were dames’ academies—there were two of these old-time institutions in our lane. Approached by a dark passage, the second of these had for its lecture-hall a large brick-floored room, whose presiding spirit was a dwarfish lady of sixty-five or more, before whom we sat in rows at long desks. The school consisted of about a score of children who were awed into subjection by a threatening rod of supple ash, half as long again as the tapering stick around which the scarlet-runners in your kitchen garden love to entwine themselves. This dread implement of discipline, reared in a recess near our mistress’s desk, would oft descend upon the head of a chattering boy or girl, and to the tip of that rod my own pate was no stranger.

Among my acquaintances at this school was a Gypsy girl whose parents dwelt at the sunny end of the aforementioned court. A year or two my senior, Sibby Smith was a shapely lass, having soft hazel eyes and a wealth of dark hair crowning an olive-tinted face. Lissom as whalebone, she had a pretty way of capering along the lanes with hedgerow berries or leaves of autumn’s painting in her hair, and I, a silent, retiring boy, would watch her movements with admiring eyes. Fittingly upon that lithe form sat a garb of tawny-brown, with here a wisp of red and there a tag of yellow, mingled as on the wings of a butterfly. The girl had a harum-scarum brother, Snakey by name and slippery by nature, a little older than herself, with whom out of school hours she would be off and away searching the bushes for birds’ nests, or ransacking the thickets for nuts; and one day in school I remember how she pulled out inadvertently with her handkerchief a catapult—a Gypsy can bring down a pheasant with the like—and falling with a clatter at our teacher’s feet, the unholy weapon was straightway confiscated, whereat Sibby’s face grew darker by a shade, as with her pen-nib she savagely stabbed the desk on which our copybooks were outspread. A roamer in all the copses and lanes around our city, and enjoying the freedom of the camps which tarried for little or for long in the old brickyards fringing the common, this schoolmate of mine expressed the out-of-door spirit in her very gait, and as she pirouetted along the causeway, you caught from her flying figure the smell of wood smoke and the mossy odour of deep dingles.

In all the world it is hard to find the elusive Gypsy’s compeer. Whimsical as the wind, and brimful of mischief as an elf of the wilds, Sibby was to me the embodiment of bewitching mystery. From a hillock by the hedge I have watched her seize a skittish pony by the mane and, leaping astride its back, gallop madly along a lane, to return a few moments later, breathless and dishevelled. This was her frolicsome mood.

Never very far below the surface of the Gypsy nature lurks a feeling of disdain, waxing fierce at times towards everything and everybody outside the Romany world. To this mood the Gypsy life appears to be the only life worth living, and the Gypsy is the only real man in the world. All other ways and all alien folk are suspect. There were times therefore when Sibby’s eyes would pierce me through with arrows of detestation as though one had hailed from beneath the eaves of a constabulary. Yet the next day, every shred of this dark feeling would be flung to the winds, as under a scented may-bush the girl was romancing merrily or instructing me in the peculiar whistle giving warning of the approach of Velveteens or a policeman.

Is there in the whole bag of humanity, I wonder, a nut harder to crack than the Gypsy?

One afternoon in turning a corner sharply on my way home from school, it happened that I ran full tilt into Sibby Smith, and before I could say “Jack Robinson” I received such a blow on the mouth as sent me sprawling all my length on the road. There was, I suppose, something ludicrous in the sight of a prostrate boy with his legs in the air; so at least the girl seemed to think, for immediately she burst into laughter, and her merriment being ever of an infectious sort, I found myself laughing too, though inwardly I thought my punishment unmerited. A moment later, however, as I stood wiping the blood from my lips, the puzzle was explained. There in the dust lay a half-eaten, red-cheeked apple which the Gypsy had been munching when the shock of the collision sent it flying from her hand; hence the blow that descended upon me so swiftly. Nor after the lapse of nearly forty years have I forgotten the forceful stroke that laid me low on that autumn afternoon.

On stormy days, when the loud-lunged gusts made a fanfaronade in the chimney-stacks at home, it was my delight as a boy to seek the brow of the grassy escarpment overlooking our common, and at that time I knew nothing more glorious than a tussle with the wind roaring over the hilltop. Leaping on the springy turf, hatless and bare-armed, fighting a make-believe giant of sonorous voice, what high glee of spirit was mine!

In those days the escarpment boasted a row of windmills, old-fashioned structures, built partly of timber and partly of brick and stone, and loud was the whirring of sails thereabouts in a brisk wind. At the head of a cleft in the hillside, known as “Hobbler’s Hole,” was a mill which had fallen into desuetude, and its great sails, shattered by a tempest, lay in tangled heaps on the thistle-grown plot around the building. To the tall thistles, tufted with downy seed, came goldfinches, dainty little fellows, shy as fairies. Hitherward came also visitors of another kind, for, as might be expected, the unwritten invitation to such a harvest of firewood had duly spread to Gypsy Court. More than once in the twilight Sibby got me to help her in carrying off fragments of timber, and to a boy with Tiger Tom the Pirate secreted in the lining of his jacket, these small adventures were not without a tang of the picaresque. As time went on, the door in the basement of the mill and most of the window-frames were dragged piecemeal from their places to boil Gypsy kettles, but there still remained the massive ladder giving access to the dusty chambers wherein nestled the strangest of shadows. Every youngster who came to play in Hobbler’s Hole knew quite well that the mill was haunted. Readily enough we climbed the worm-eaten ladder in broad daylight, and scampered about the resounding floors, or sat at the frameless windows pelting bits of plaster at the jackdaws flitting to and fro, but to think of invading the mouldering mill in the dusk hour when hollow and common were visioned away into shadowy night was another matter. Ah, then the mill took on an eeriness befitting a very borderland of goblindom.

Picturing the crumbling ruin and the wrinkled declivity dipping below it towards the common, I recall how Snakey Smith said one day to me, “I likes to sit afore a fire on the ground. You don’t feel nothing like so lonesome as you keeps pushing sticks into the fire and watching ’em burn away.” The words aptly express a Gypsy’s joy in a fire for its own sake, regardless of utilitarian considerations. At the moment there may be no kettle waiting to be boiled, no black stockpot demanding to be slung on the crooked kettle-prop, yet, for the pure pleasure of the thing, a Gypsy will light a small pile of dead sticks, and, lounging near, will gaze wistfully at the spiral of thin, sweet smoke upcurling between the trees in the lane.

Without a doubt, if “you’s been a bit onlucky,” or, if your sky is cloudy with sorrow, there is solace in a fire, as in a folk-tale and in the voice of a violin. Did not Provost M‘Cormick, lawyer and lover of Gypsies, find his Border Tinklers, amid their brown tents and shaggy “cuddies,” reciting traditional tales to banish gloom? “Whenever he saw me dull he wad say, ‘Come on, Mary, and I’ll tell ye a fairy tale,’ and wi’ his gestures, girns, and granes, he wadna be lang till he had us a’ roarin’.”

A Gypsy who resided in a derelict railway carriage on a Cheshire common, having lost a dear child, refused to be comforted and even declined to take food. To his old fiddle he confided his grief, his body swaying to and fro as he drew forth plaintive airs from the strings.

Wandering one evening in cowslip-time below the decrepit windmill, I came to a stile in the hedge, and, passing into the lane, I found Sibby and Snakey heaping dead wood upon a fire on the margin of the common.

“There!” exclaimed the Gypsy girl, “I know’d somebody was a-thinking of me, ’cos my boots kept coming unlaced.”

“Well, well, you made me jump, baw (mate), you did,” put in her brother. “How did you jin we were akai?” (know we were here).

“See,” said I, “what a pother you are making. I caught a whiff of your smoke right on top of the hill.”

With that I dropped down beside the fire, and, yielding the soul to the witchery of red-gold flames dancing against the dark, it was easy enough to glide into the realm of Faerie. Sibby, who had been lying at full length before the fire, now gathered herself into a cross-legged posture, and, lapsing into meditation, sat twisting a black elf-lock round her forefinger. A touch of the “creepy” world seemed also to have fallen upon Snakey, for he lay in silence staring into the beyond as though he had sighted fairy faces peering between the brier sprays; or was it that the knotted tree-bole leaning from the hedge had begun to make grimaces? At last the boy awoke with a start. By his side lay a maiden ash-plant with numerous hearts and rings neatly cut on its green bark, and, whipping out a knife, he proceeded to add further touches to his kosht (stick). This led me to talk of my own achievement of that day in carving my initials on a beech tree not far from where we were sitting. Whereat Sibby remarked—

“Why, it was only last week that me and mother went in our cart past Dalton Brook, and we pulled up to look at the old tree what has dui vastaw (two hands) cut into it by Orferus Herren, and there they were right enough. It was his brother Evergreen who broke his neck by tumbling headlong into a stone-pit, wasn’t it, Snakey?”

“For sure it was, pen (sister), and our uncles Fennix and Euri were well-nigh killed the same way right up agen Scotland, as I’ve heard dad say times and agen.”

“How was that?” I asked.

Then followed Snakey’s story, which, as well as I remember, ran (in his own words) something like this—

“One night my uncles Fennix and Euri was crossing a moor among the mountains, a long way up into the North Country. They’d been sitting all the day in a kitshima (tavern) and at last they begins to think it were time to be marching to their stopping-place, some five miles away across the moor, a wery nasty country with deep pits and ponds in it. It was getting dark and the teeny stars were shining above the mountains. Well, my uncles made off with a deal of bustle at first along a beaten track, but after going a mile or two, down comes a fog—a clear thick ’un it was—and they soon got off the path and were lost. It looked like ’em having to besh avrí (lie out) all night, as poor Jacob did. Only my uncles didn’t see no silver ladder with angels dancing up and down on it, and mi dîri Duvel (God) sitting atop of it. But just as they were about dead beat after poddling up and down for I can’t tell you how long, they walked as nigh as nothing over the edge of a deep pit. It were a narrow shave, for they only managed to save theirselves by clutching at the bushes atop of the pit. Then what do you think, baw? They just turned round, and there afore ’em stood a terrible crittur rearing itself up and groaning loud. Their hearts was in their mouths. They thought their time had come.

“‘If that ain’t a mulo (ghost), my name’s not Fennix,’ whispered my uncle.

“‘Keka’ (No); ‘it’s the wery Beng (Devil) hisself,’ says Euri.

“And there they stands a-dithering like leaves, till at last my uncle Fennix pulls hisself together and walks on a yard or two, staring hard afore him, and weren’t Euri glad above a bit to hear his brother say in his nat’ral voice, ‘Come on, it’s nobbut a blessed dunnock (steer) after all.’ And with that the crittur kicked up its heels and galloped away, and by a bit of luck my uncles stumbled right on to a cartway as led ’em straight to the tents.”

Among Gypsies, when the tale-telling mood is on, story will follow story, often until drowsiness supervenes; for these folk dearly love a tale, and are themselves possessed of no small store of family legends and folk-narratives.

“Now, it’s your turn, sister. Let’s have that tale about Old Ruzlam Boz’ll’s boy.”

Without stopping for a moment to think, Sibby began to reel off what was evidently a well-known and favourite story, punctuating her sentences by picking from her gown and flinging at me sundry prickly balls of burdock seed, telling of what prowlings in the woods!

“It’s donkey’s ears (i.e. long years) since Ruzlam Boz’ll’s wife had a baby boy born’d in a tent near a spring what bubbled out betwixt two rocks, and every summer they used to besh (rest) by the same spring. By and by, when the dear little boy grew big enough, his mammy sent him every morning to fill the kettle. But one day he got a surprise. There on the grass by the spring what should he see but a new silver shilling. Of course he picked it up and put it into his pocket, and never said nothing about it when he got back to the tent. Next morning he found double the money at the spring-head, and so it went on until his pockets were chinking full of silver, and for all that he never breathed no word about his luck. But one day Old Ruzlam heard the boy rattling the money in his pockets, and forced him to tell where he got it from. Next morning the daddy went off, laughing to hisself and thinking of the nice heap of silver he was going to pick up, but after he had looked up and down and all over, he found just nothing at all, leastways he saw no money; but as he stood scratting his head, puzzled-like, there, on one side of the spring, he saw a dear little teeny old man, and on the other side a dear little teeny old woman, and, saying never a word, they stooped down and flung water right into Ruzlam’s eyes. So away he ran home, and there, if he didn’t find his boy had gone cross-eyed. What’s more, he never came right agen.”

Thus, by pleasant steps amid scenes not lacking in glamour, I advanced little by little in my knowledge of these fascinating straylings with whom no stranger ever yet found it easy to mingle as one of themselves.

CHAPTER II
CHARACTERS OF THE COURT—READING BORROW

A FEW miles outside my native city, there stands on the bank of the Roman Fossdyke a lonely house known as “Drinsey Nook,” formerly a tavern with bowling greens, swings, and skittle alleys, a resort of wagonette and boating parties out for a frolic in the sunshine. Often on bygone summer eves have I loitered about the old inn gleaming white amid its guardian trees, but best of all I loved to see the beechen boughs drop their fiery leaves upon its mossy roof in the fading of the year.

To-day, as of yore, the brown-sailed barges, laden with grain or scented fir-planks, glide lazily past the place, and a motor-boat will at times go racing by, to the alarm of the waterhens which had almost come to look on the sleepy canal as their own.

Does it ever dream of its gay past, I wonder—this old forgotten house fronting upon the rush-fringed waterway?

One golden October morning, my father, who had a passion for boating on our local waters, hired a small sailing craft, and, the breezes aiding us, we were wafted along the Fossdyke as far as the said riparian house of call. Hour after hour we wandered in the beech woods stretching behind the inn, resting now on some protruding snag or fallen bole to watch the squirrels at play, and again pushing our way breast-high through sheets of changing bracken to the hazel thickets where the nuts hung in clusters well within reach of our hooked sticks.

Linked with this ramble in the time of the falling leaves is an impression I have never forgotten. “Look,” said my father, pointing to a decayed stump of a post almost buried amid dank moss, “this is all that remains of Tom Otter’s gibbet-tree.” I shuddered as he told how in other days he had heard the chains clanking in the wind, and he went on to relate that his father was among the crowd of citizens who, starting from Lincoln Castle one March morning in the year 1806, followed the murderer’s corpse until it was hanged in irons on a post thirty feet high on Saxilby Moor. For several days after the event, the vicinity of the gibbet resembled a country fair with drinking booths, ballad singers, Gypsy fiddlers, and fortune-tellers.

The impressions of childhood are enduring; and just as the smell of the wallflowers after an April shower will revive for you, dear fellow, the vision of a garden walk under a lichened wall, and the dainty step of your lady love by your side, so for me the wild scent of withering bracken in the red autumn glades prompts my fancy to envisage anew the gruesome scene as depicted by my father on that October day long gone by. Nor is this all.

To mention the name of Tom Otter is to call up for me more than one swarthy inhabitant of Gypsy Court who lived to make old bones and sit by the fire telling tales and smoking black tobacco. I have but to close my eyes to behold a procession of these “characters” straggling out of the dark court, their faces and figures lingering for a moment in memory’s beam of light, then passing again into the shadows. And what strange stories are wrapped up in the names and lives of some of these folk; quaint comedy, grim tragedy, riotous passion, tales of love, laughter, and tears.

There was old Tom, nicknamed “Tom o’ the Gibbet,” whose patronymic was Petulengro, which is Gypsy for Smith.

Each of the great Romany clans, be it known, duplicates its surname, one form being used before the gawjê (non-Gypsies, aliens); the other form, of cryptic import, is for the brotherhood of the blood.

Old Tom Petulengro, further known as “Sneezing Tommy,” owing to his liking for snuff, carried on a thriving trade in wooden meat-skewers and pegs, and in his backyard you might see him with infinite patience cutting up willow rods or splitting blocks of close-grained elder-wood; and for years I never used to hear in church the familiar words of the Psalmist, “Our bones lie strewn before the pit, like as when one heweth wood upon the earth,” without seeing that narrow yard with its shining axe lying midst a litter of chips and splinters. Elder-wood is still in request for meat-skewers, and to this day not a few country butchers prefer to use the Gypsy-made article. Old Tom used to say, with a twinkle in his eye, that he found nearly all his raw material on his journeys up and down the countryside. For, as you could not fail to observe, it was a habit with some of the dwellers in Gypsy Court to absent themselves periodically with their light carts and tents. Halcyon days were those for the court Gypsies.

Let it be remembered that the County Council legend, “No camping allowed,” had not yet begun to hit you in the eye from among the bramble brakes on bits of wayside waste. The rural constable of that time had not the conveniences his successor enjoys in the bicycle and the village telephone. There were farmers who still retained a soft place in their hearts for the Gypsy, and many a country squire viewed the nomads of the grassy lanes with a kindly eye. If a carriage-horse grew restive in passing a roadside fire at twilight, up from the hedge-bottom sprang an obliging fellow who led the animal safely along and thereby won a cheery word from the squire or his lady. Even Velveteens would hob-nob with the jovial campers on the lord’s waste, and, quaffing a dram from their black bottle, would toss a rabbit into the lap of a Romany mother and go on his way. Here and there of course were tiresome believers in the hoary policy of harassment and oppression—

“Pack, and be out of this forthwith,
D’you know you have no business here?
‘No, we hain’t got,’ said Samuel Smith,
‘No business to be anywhere.’
So wearily they went away,
Yet soon were camped in t’other lane,
And soon they laughed as wild and gay,
And soon the kettle boiled again.”

Reverting to Tom Petulengro’s sobriquet, I confess it provoked my curiosity not a little. Tom o’ the Gibbet—what could the strange “tag” mean? Time passed, even a few years, and one day its origin came to light during a talk with Ashena Brown, Tom’s married sister, an elderly Gypsy with a furrowed countenance and deep-set eyes which flashed with fire as she grew excited in her talk. I can see her bowed figure and long jetty curls, as in fancy I again stoop to enter the low-ceiled abode in the smoky court where I listened to her chatter to the persistent accompaniment of a donkey’s thump, thump, in an adjoining apartment.

“Wonderful fond o’ the County o’ Nottingham was my people,” said the old lady. “They know’d every stick and stone along the Trentside, and i’ the Shirewood (Sherwood), and many’s the time we’ve stopped at Five Lane Ends nigh Drinsey Nook. Why, my poor dear mammy (Lord rest her soul) was once fired at by a foot-pad as she were coming outen the public upo’ the bank there. The man’s pistol had nobbut powder in it, for he only meant to trash (frighten) her into handing up her lova (money), but she had none about her, for her last shukora (sixpence) had gone in levina (ale). And after that, my mammy allus wore a big diklo (kerchief) round her head for to hide her cheek as were badly blued by the rascal’s powder.

“Ay, and I minds how my daddy used to make teeny horseshoes, knife handles, and netting needles, outen the bits o’ wood he tshin’d (cut) off the gibbet post, and wery good oak it was. Mebbe you’s heard o’ Tom Otter’s post nigh to the woods? Ah, but p’raps you’s never been tell’d that our Tom was born’d under it? The night my mammy were took bad, our tents was a’most blown to bits. The wind banged the old irons agen the post all night long, as I’ve heard her say. And when they wanted to name the boy, they couldn’t think of no other name but Tom, for sure as they tried to get away from it, the name kept coming back again—Tom, Tom, Tom—till it sort o’ dinned itself into their heads. So at last my daddy says, ‘Let’s call him Tom and done with it,’ and i’ time, folks got a-calling him Tom o’ the Gibbet, and it stuck to him, it did. There, now, I must give that here maila (donkey) a bite o’ summut.”

But I have not done with Tom Otter.

Here is a story even more “creepy” than the last. Ashena is again the speaker. “I’ them days I’d some delations as did funny things that folks wouldn’t never think o’ doing nowadays. I’d an uncle as used to talk to the Beng (Devil). If anything went wrong wi’ a hoss, he’d say, ‘Beng, do this, and Beng, do that,’ like we talks to the Duvel (God) when we says ’ur prayers. But he weren’t eddicated, you see, he didn’t know no better. And whenever uncle and aunt used to pass by Tom Otter’s gibbet, they’d stop and look up at the poor man hanging there, and they allus wuser’d (threw) him a bit o’ hawben (food). They couldn’t let theirselves go by wi’out doing that.

“And there was a baker from Harby, and whenever he passed by the place he would put a bread loaf on to the pointed end of a long rod and shove it into that part o’ the irons where poor Tom’s head was, and sure enough the bread allus went. The baker got hisself into trouble for doing that, as I’ve heard our old people say.”

Commenting on a parallel instance, occurring about the year 1779, in which some women were wont to throw up to a gibbeted man a bunch of tallow candles for him to eat, the Rev. S. Baring-Gould, in his Book of Folk-Lore, writes: “Obviously the idea was still prevalent that life continued to exist in the body after execution.”

In the procession of “characters” issuing from the dark court, I see two familiar figures, the parents of my Gypsy schoolmate, who would surely have arrested even a stranger’s gaze.

Partly from age, and partly from the habit of his calling, Plato Smith the tinman stooped somewhat, yet his legs, which were long in comparison with his body, carried him over the ground fast enough. A nearer view of the old man’s countenance revealed certain scars concerning which tales were told to his credit as a fighter. True, he had on one occasion been worsted by an adversary, for the bridge of his nose diverged somewhat from the straight line, a record of a telling blow. Always alert, Plato looked the picture of spryness when soap and water had removed all traces of the workshop, and he had donned a green cutaway coat, a bright yellow neckcloth, and a felt “hat of antique shape,” high in the crown and broad of brim, which was pulled well over his eyes whenever he went out. It was whispered that none knew better than he how to whistle a horse out of a field, but in this art I fancy he had grown rusty of late years. To be sure, his long record as a poacher had brought him occasional lodgments in the local house of detention, yet so ingrained was this Gypsy habit that he could hardly refrain from chalking his gun-barrel and sallying forth on moonlit nights.

A riverside incident associated with Sibby’s father is as fresh in my memory as if it happened but yesterday. A stream neither broad nor deep is our homely Witham, crawling onward through fenny flats to the North Sea. It was here that I learned on summer days to pull an oar in an old black coble, and to glide steel-shod over the ice in the Christmas holidays. Along a certain reach of the river, I was initiated by an elder brother into the mysteries of angling on those tranquil evenings when the bold perch showed their heads above water, like the fishes that listened to St. Anthony’s sermon. Now it fell upon a day that my brother and I were crossing the river by ferry-boat, a few miles outside the city, our companions being Plato Smith and an ecclesiastic from the minster-close—four happy anglers were we. At one end of the flat-bottomed ferry-boat stood the parson fingering his rod and whistling a lively tune, when, in midstream, there was a sudden hitch in the chain, flinging the perspiring ferryman upon his face, and at the same time precipitating our friend from the minster-close headlong into the river. Never have I seen a wild duck, or a white-pate coot, disappear more cleanly from sight than did our brother of “the cloth” into the liquid element. Thanks mainly to Gypsy Plato’s resourcefulness, he was extricated pretty quickly, and we left him in the care of an innkeeper, in whose parlour at dusk we met him in borrowed raiment, looking more than usually pallid of countenance beneath the broad eaves of our kindly host’s old-fashioned Sunday “topper” padded to fit with a vivid red handkerchief.

A personality even more striking was Plato’s consort, Abigail, as you saw her sunning herself under the parapet of the Witham bridge hard by the “Three Magpies” Inn, her black eyes blinking as a gust from the river flapped the loose ends of her gay kerchiefs which she wore three or four deep, meeting on her bosom in old-time style. Hooked like a falcon’s beak, her nose drooped over her pursed lips towards a prominent chin, giving her a witchlike mien. Quadrupled strings of corals encircled her wizened neck, and a black velvet bodice bedecked with silver buttons, a skirt of bold check pattern, and a poke-bonnet formed her customary walking attire. Often, on her homeward way after her daily round with the basket, have I met her puffing a small black pipe as she shuffled along our lane. By didakais (half-breeds) she was certainly feared, and they maintained it was bad luck to meet her first thing of a morning, and were known to turn back on seeing her in the street. “Her eyes make you feel that queer” was a common saying, and it follows that she ranked high as a fortune-teller. Seldom a fair passed but you met her in the noisy throng, chaffing the gawjê (gentiles), or surrounded by a group of village Johnnies and Mollies eager to have their palms read. What a picture she made as she stooped to tighten the girths of her shaggy donkey at whose head stood the wild, dusky Sibby with a spring wind whisking her black locks about her cheeks, out on the open road beyond the town, for maid and mother were devoted companions on many a foray into the villages dotted over Lincoln Heath.

Another conspicuous character of the court was a quaint little hunchback, a pedlar by trade, whose sad deformity and resentful temper caused him to become the butt of every street gamin’s joke. He would often be seen in company with Sammy Noble, a wooden-legged vendor of firewood. The pair, I regret to say, called too frequently at taverns, and more than once I have seen them assisted home by kindly policemen, or “peelers,” as they were then called, who if resurrected to-day in their long black coats and chimney-pot hats, would surely be taken for nothing short of cathedral dignitaries.

The hero of the Gypsy colony was a tall athletic fellow, “Soldier” ’Plisti (or Supplistia) Boswell, who also bore the nickname of “Jumping Jack,” of whom I give a reminiscence or two here.

One day a country squire was driving a pony chaise along a lane, and, rounding a corner, he came upon a ring of Gypsies roasting hedgehogs. Imagine his astonishment to see a slender lad spring up, and, running a few yards, take a flying leap clear over the pony’s back, a feat so pleasing to the squire that he called the boy to his side and, presenting him with a bright crown-piece, offered—so the tale runs—“to keep him like a gentleman for life.” In return for which kindness, the Gypsy was expected to disown his people, a condition which was not jumped at by Jack.

’Plisti’s home in Gypsy Court was one day the scene of a singular incident. A fox closely pursued by the hounds dashed through the open door of the living-room, where before the fire lay the Gypsy asleep and snoring. Reynard in his haste managed to sweep the sleeper’s face with his brush; and mighty was the yell that burst from ’Plisti’s throat on being thus disturbed, causing the fox to seek refuge in a hovel hard by, where the dogs fell upon him. A brother of mine who was in the court at the time obtained possession of the brush, and the trophy was given a conspicuous place in our home.

In those days it was no unusual course for the Gypsy lads to enlist in the Militia, and ’Plisti looked every inch a soldier as he marched homeward from the morning’s drill on the common. In play he would level his musket at you, and laugh like a merry boy, if you caught his spirit and made believe that you were wounded. If he was proud of his scarlet jacket, his characteristic Gypsy vanity led him to glory in shirts of dyes so resplendent that in comparison the vaunted multi-coloured coat of Joseph would indeed have been thrown into the shade.

The Gypsy spell cast upon me in childhood was now reinforced by my discovery of the autobiographical writings of George Borrow. It was in my teens that I devoured Lavengro in its original three-volume form. By taper-light in an attic bedroom at home, or in some hollow on the common where the battered race-cards whitened the base of the gorse bushes—our old common is the annual scene of the Lincolnshire Handicap—I thrilled over the boy Borrow’s encounter with the Gypsies in the green lane at Norman Cross. I followed him through the crowded horse-fair at Norwich, and into the smoky tents pitched upon Mousehold Heath. But the episode which impressed me most of all was the fight with the Flaming Tinman. The dramatis personæ of that narrative would pursue me even into my dreams. The Romany Rye, with its vivid picture of Horncastle Fair, was pleasant enough reading, though not nearly so fascinating as Lavengro. Little did I think that the coming days were to bring some of Borrows originals within my ken.

How far Borrow’s Gypsies are portraits of individuals, and to what extent we are able to identify them, are questions which have often been asked. Don Jorge would probably have denied the charge of individual portraiture, yet there is no doubt that he had definite prototypes in his mind’s eye when penning his narratives. Just as in Guy Mannering, Sir Walter Scott portrayed an actual Jean Gordon under the name of Meg Merrilies, so we know that Borrow has given us his old friend Ambrose Smith under the now famous cognomen of “Jasper Petulengro,” a fact made plain by Dr. Knapp in his monumental work [28] familiar to all Gypsy students. Shortly before his death at Dunbar in October, 1878, Ambrose Smith and his wife Sanspirela (a Heron before marriage), together with their family, had been noticed and befriended by Queen Victoria. To wit: the following entry in More Leaves from the Journal of a Life in the Highlands.

“August 26th, 1878.—At half-past three started with Beatrice, Leopold, and the Duchess in the landau, and four, the Duke, Lady Ely, General Ponsonby, and Mr. Yorke, going in the second carriage, and Lord Haddington riding all the way. We drove through the west part of Dunbar, which was very full, and we were literally pelted with small nosegays, till the carriage was full of them; then for some distance past the village of Belheven, Knockendale Hill, where were stationed in their best attire the queen of the gipsies, an oldish woman [Sanspirela] with a yellow handkerchief on her head, and a youngish, very dark, and truly gipsy-like woman in velvet and a red shawl, and another woman. The queen is a thorough gipsy, with a scarlet cloak and a yellow handkerchief around her head. Men in red hunting-coats, all very dark, and all standing on a platform here, bowed and waved their handkerchiefs.”

In the seventh chapter of The Romany Rye, Borrow tells how he one day got his dinner “entirely off the body of a squirrel which had been shot the day before by a chal of the name of Piramus, who, besides being a good shot, was celebrated for his skill in playing on the fiddle.”

Nieces of Piramus Gray, whom I know, have testified to their uncle’s excellence as a marksman, and on the authority of Sinfai, a daughter of Piramus, I have been told that Ambrose Smith’s praise of her father’s fiddling was well founded.

“About a week ago my people and myself” (the speaker is Ambrose, i.e. Jasper Petulengro) “were encamped on a green by a plantation in the neighbourhood of a great house. In the evening we were making merry, the girls dancing, while Piramus was playing on the fiddle a tune of his own composing, to which he had given his own name, Piramus of Rome, and which is much celebrated amongst our people, and from which I have been told one of the grand gorgio composers who once heard it has taken several hints.”

The gifted fiddler was at that time only a slim fellow of twenty-eight summers. Long years afterwards, when Piramus was a very old man and I a youth of twenty, I remember seeing him in our Lincolnshire town of Louth, where he was still tapping with his tinker’s hammer and fondling his violin in his cottage at the River Head. A story which the old man never tired of telling was that of his brother Jack’s heroism.

Upon a day, many years ago, the children of Piramus were boating on a river, and, their craft capsizing, all were flung into the stream. Jack, who happened to be on the bank, leaped in and saved all but two, the oldest and the youngest, who were drowned. In his day Piramus had excelled as a fighter, and certainly the knotty fists of the aged tinman looked as if they had done service in the bruising line.

Two visitors who loved to cheer the last days of Piramus were his daughter Sinfai and her husband, Isaac Heron, who have themselves now passed away. Whenever I think of the tall figure of Old Isaac, I recall one evening in the summer of 1876, when a camp of the Herons lay just outside of Lincoln. What appeared to be a Gypsy trial was in progress, and I remember the inward thrill on beholding those Herons in a ring, chattering like a flock of daws. Inside the circle stands a young man, bare-headed, stripped of coat and vest, and gesticulating wildly. Now he flings his arms about, and now he thrusts his fingers through his shaggy black hair. On his brow the sweat stands in beads. I can hear the name “Wilhelmina,” as it comes in a piercing shriek from his lips. The old men and women are muttering together as calmly they look on. In that throng were Isaac and Sinfai, along with some of the older Yorkshire Herons, Golias, Khulai, and others.

In after years I came to know very intimately many members of the clan Heron, and among them a niece of that weird old hag, Mrs. Herne (to use Borrow’s spelling of the name), who sent the poisoned cake to Lavengro in Mumper’s Dingle.

Having had a romantic interest in the Gypsies aroused in me thus early, I naturally looked forward to the days when I should leave home and meet the people of the kawlo rat (black blood) in other parts of the country.

CHAPTER III
NORTH-COUNTRY GYPSIES

A TYPICAL colliery village in a bleak northern county was the scene of my first curacy. Silhouettes of ugliness were its black pit buildings, dominated by a mountain of burning refuse exhaling night and day a poisonous breath which tarnished your brass candlesticks and rendered noxious the “long, unlovely street” of the parish. What in the name of wisdom induced me to pitch my tent in such a spot, I can scarcely say at this distance of time, unless perhaps it was a mad desire to rub against something rough and rude after having been reared in the drowsy atmosphere of pastoral Lincolnshire.

But if the picture which met my gaze on parochial rounds possessed no inspiring feature, you may take my word for it that the setting of the picture was undeniably charming. Close at hand lay the valley of the Wear, by whose brown and amber waters, broken by frequent beds of gravel, I used to wander, trout-rod in hand, or, wading ankle-deep in bluebells, I added to my store of nature-knowledge by observing the ways of the wood-folk—the tawny squirrel on his fir-bough, the red-polled woodpecker hammering at a decayed elm-branch, or a lank heron standing stiff as a stake on the margin of a pool.

Across the airy uplands at the back of the village runs a road which was ever a favourite walk of mine. Away in the distance, Durham’s towers lift their grey stones, and nearer across the fields, “like a roebuck at bay,” rises the castle, which together with the lordship of Brancepeth, Geoffrey, grandson of the Norman Gilbert de Nevil, received as dowry with Emma Bulmer, his Saxon bride. Right well I came to know the weathered walls of Brancepeth Castle, where in fancy I used to hear the blare of bugle (not the motor-horn), and to a dreamer it is still a place where “the swords shine and the armour rings.”

One June day I took the byway over the hills, and as I leaned upon a gate looking towards the castle, a sound of wheels not far off was heard on the gritty roadway, and from round the corner a party of Gypsies hove in sight. There were two or three carts bearing the name of Watland, with several comely people aboard, and lagging in the rear came a pair of shaggy colts, whipped up by a shock-headed lad of fifteen. When I greeted these wanderers, they drew rein and descended from the carts, and standing there in the sunshine on the road, they appeared to me more than anything like a gang of prehistoric folk risen from some tumulus on the moor; features, garments, horses, vehicles—all were tinctured with Mother Earth’s reds and browns picked up from wild heaths, clay-pits, and sandy lanes. To my mind the sight was an agreeable variation from the daily procession of miners so black with coal-dust that you could not for the life of you distinguish Bill from Bob, or Jack from Jerry.

“Are you stopping about here?” I asked, after an exchange of salutations.

“Yes; come and see us to-night on top o’ the moor. We’ll be fixed up by then.” Turning to his wife, the leader of the party said—

“Ay, doesn’t he remind you of that young priest up yonder by Newcastle, what used to come and take a cup of tea with us?”

There was something about these Watlands which impressed me. Although obviously poor, they were light-hearted—I had caught the lilt of a song before they came in sight. A blithesome spirit of acceptance, a serenity drawn from Nature’s bosom was theirs, and I could imagine them whistling cheerily as they bent their heads to buffeting storms.

“Take no thought for the morrow,” is the Gypsy’s own philosophy. Were real road-folk ever able to tell you the route of the morrow’s itinerary? Break of day will be time enough to discuss the next stage of the journey.

Sundown’s fires burned redly behind the black pines, as I found myself on the moor, a wide expanse tracked by little paths worn by passing feet, a haunt of whin-chats, grasshoppers, and bright-eyed lizards—sun-lovers all.

Knowing the whimsicalities of the Gypsy nature, I had half expected to draw a blank after dawdling through the afternoon at Brancepeth Castle. I wondered whether my luck would be the same as on a past occasion whereon it happened that down a green lane I had located a picturesque lot of Gypsies who might almost have stepped straight out of a Morland canvas, and most anxious I was to secure a few snapshots, but unfortunately my camera had been left at home.

“You’ll be here all day, I expect?”

“To be sure we shall, my rai, you’ll find us here koliko sawla (to-morrow morning), if you’s a mind to come.”

Preferring to act upon the carpe diem principle, I returned with my camera as expeditiously as I could, and though but an hour and a half had elapsed, alas! my birds had flown. Homewards I trudged, a joy-bereft soul for whom the world had suddenly grown empty.

This leads me to remark that the Gypsies are far from easy to photograph. The degree of friendship does not enter into the problem. I have known strangers to pose readily, while old friends have doggedly refused to be “took.” Once a friend and I had talked one of the reticent Herons into a willingness to be photographed. Yes, on the morrow he would be “took.” But with the morrow his mood had changed. “No, raia, not for a thousand pounds.”

I remember photographing a Gypsy girl under curious conditions. Said I, as she sat upon the grass—

“You’ll allow me to take a little picture? Your hair is so pretty, and you have a happy face.”

But, no, my words were wasted. Bad luck followed that sort of thing, a cousin of hers had died a fortnight after being “took.”

“But isn’t there some charm for keeping off bad luck?”

Looking thoughtful for a moment, she replied—

“Oh yes, if you’ll give me a pair of bootlaces, you can lel mi mui (take my face) as many times as you kom” (like).

I had a pair of laces, but they were in my boots. Nothing daunted, however, I went off to a shop in the village half a mile away, and was soon back again presenting the laces to the girl with an Oriental salaam.

Then I got my picture.

Reverting to the Watlands, I was not disappointed. There in a hollow on the moor I found them squatting around their fires. Wearied by travel, some of the elders had retired for the night. “Dik lesti’s pîro” (look at his foot), said one of the boys, pointing to a man’s bare brown foot protruding from beneath a tent cover. Within view of Durham’s twinkling lights we sat, and my tobacco pouch having gone the round, we were soon deep in the sayings and doings of the Watlands of other days, for when business is off Gypsies ever talk of Gypsies. As I looked at these folk, it seemed as though behind them through the dusk peered the shades of Romanies of an older, weirder sort, who shunned contact with cities and hated gawjê (non-Gypsies) with a bitterness unknown to-day.

Here is a tale of the old times, obtained from grizzled “Durham” Mike Watland, and translated more or less into my own words.

“When I was a little fellow, I used to listen with delight to a blood-curdling story which my grandfather used to tell as we sat watching the red embers die out at night. One time he found himself in a strange predicament, and got such a “gliff” as he had never experienced before. This of course was many years ago, for my grandfather lived to the age of ninety-four, and I am one of the third generation of a long-lived family of Gypsies. The ways of our people were a bit different then. In those days, you saw no harm in taking anything you had a fancy for, if you could get it. My grandfather was a young fellow, and on this particular morning he crossed a moor and came to a hamlet containing three or four straggling houses, and near one of these stood a cowshed and a low barn. In passing the shed he saw hanging there a nice porker which had been killed early that morning, and round it was wrapped a sack to prevent dogs or cats from gnawing it. All this my grandfather observed as he hawked his goods at the cottage door, inwardly resolving to pay Mr. Piggy a visit by night. All was quiet when at a late hour he re-crossed the moor and arrived at the shed, on entering which he put out his hands and felt for the pig where he had seen it hanging in the morning, but, no, it had been removed. It then occurred to him that for greater safety it might have been carried into the low-roofed barn, so in he went and felt all along the cross-beam. He was right. Sure enough the pig’s face struck cold to his hand. Quickly he cut the rope, and, slinging piggy across his shoulder, was soon making his way back to the camping-place. But crossing that rough land with a heavy load was no easy task, and you may be sure that the farther he went the heavier it became. When descending a slope, he caught his foot in a hole, and down he tumbled with his burden. Now as he arose and laid hold of the rope in order to hoist the pig once more, the moon came out from behind a cloud, and revealed the face of—a dead man! For a moment he stood mesmerized by fright, then sick at heart he proceeded to acquaint the nearest constable with the fact. The corpse was identified as that of a feeble-minded cottager who had hanged himself in the barn.”

One day I was exploring the city of Durham, for my early life in Lincoln had imbued me with a love of old architecture, and the nave of Durham minster profoundly gratified my love of the sombre, when, lo, just over the way, I saw a weather-beaten vâdo (living-van), and near it was the owner, looking up and down the street as if expecting someone to appear. Crossing the road, I greeted the Gypsy, who turned out to be one of the Winters, a North-Country family to whom has been applied (not without reason) the epithet “wild,” and I remembered how Hoyland, in his Historical Survey of the Gypsies, had written—

“The distinguished Northern poet, Walter Scott, who is Sheriff of Selkirkshire, has in a very obliging manner communicated the following statement—‘ . . . some of the most atrocious families have been extirpated. I allude to the Winters, a Northumberland clan, who, I fancy, are all buried by this time.’”

But Sheriff Scott was wrong.

The Winters had only changed their haunts, and on being driven out of the Border Country had moved southward.

As I stood chatting with Mr. Winter, his handsome wife came up with a hawking-basket on her arm. I shall always remember her in connection with a story she told me.

“One day I was sitting on a bank under a garden hedge. It was a hot day and I was very thirsty. I said aloud, ‘Oh, for a drink of beer.’ Just then a voice came over the hedge, a nice, clear, silvery voice it was, like as if an angel from heaven was a-talking to me—‘You shall have one, my dearie.’ And in a minute or two a kind lady came down with a big jug of beer. How I did bless that lady for her kindness to a poor Gypsy, and I drank the lot. About a month afterwards, I heard of the death of that lady, and I vowed to myself and to the rawni’s muli (lady’s spirit) that I would never touch another drop of beer as long as I lived, and I never have done and never will no more.”

CHAPTER IV
MY POACHING PUSSY—A ROMANY BENISON—MY FIRST TASTE OF HEDGEHOG

My clerical life has been spent for the most part in green country places, chiefly amid wind-swept hills. Consequently one has learned to delight in the creatures that run and fly, the wild things of wood and wold and brookside, and this love of Nature and her children has never left me; it has companioned with me throughout my wanderings. Give me now an elevated crest commanding a broad sweep of field and forest, with the swift rush of keen air over the furze bushes, a footpath among the thorn-scrub where the finches chatter, the sedgy bank of a moorland stream from which I can hear the “flup” of the trout, or the call of the peewits somersaulting in the sunlight: simple pleasures are these, yet they bring a world of happiness to a man who loves the wilds more than cities, and the windy wold better than the stifling street.

Contrary to the popular notion that Lincolnshire is no more than a dreary expanse of black fenland soil intersected by drains of geometric straightness, I may point out that there are two well-defined hill ranges extending almost throughout the county—the chalk and greensand Wolds, and the limestone “Heights,” running parallel after the manner of the duplex spina of Virgil’s well-bred horse.

On the western edge of the Wolds, overlooking a richly varied landscape, nestles the hamlet where I made my first home after marriage, and the country lying around our hilltop parsonage was an ideal hunting-ground for a naturalist. Borne on the rude March gales the wild pipe of the curlew greeted the ear as you met the buffeting gusts along the unfrequented ridgeways, and over winter snows an observant eye might trace the badger’s spoor. On summer evenings when the far-away minster of Lincoln was a purple cameo upon an amber ground, and the shadows creeping out of the woods began to spread over the hills, a brown owl would sail by on noiseless wings, or Reynard might be seen trotting across the sheep-nibbled sward towards the warren below the clustering firs.

Rambling along the wold one gleaming autumn afternoon, my attention was attracted by the rapid movements of some diminutive, fluffy-looking creature, which to a casual saunterer might have been a wren or a hedgesparrow; but after having stood quietly for a moment or two, a dark velvety ball of fur darted towards me, and in a most confiding manner ran over my boots, and sniffed at the stout ash-plant which I invariably carry with me along the lanes. For some time I stood watching the unconscious play of this tiny mouse. At last, however, I made a move and my wee friend fled like a thought to his retreat in the hedge.

On another occasion, I was seated in my old oak stall in the village church. It was a harvest festival, and a college friend was in the midst of his sermon, when I distinctly felt something nibbling at the hem of my cassock. It was a plump grey mouse, and on moving my foot I saw him speed down the aisle like an arrow. As fortune had it, the ladies in the front pew, being properly rapt in the eloquent discourse, escaped the disquieting vision of my church mousie.

These mice incidents, with a few more like them, were strung together and dispatched to the Pall Mall Budget, edited at that time by Mr. Charles Morley. My literary effort was duly printed, with pleasing sketches from the pencil of that peerless lover of pussies, Mr. Louis Wain, the then president of the Cat Club.

It was in the same parish that I had a favourite pussy, “Tony” by name, who would daily follow me to church, and wait at the vestry door for my reappearance after matin-prayers. But, alas, he acquired the poaching habit, a sure path to destruction, as I learned one day to my sorrow in passing the keeper’s gibbet at the end of a woodland glade.

One of my rambles with this pussy I recall quite vividly. One afternoon I set off across the wold intending to make pastoral visits upon a few outlying cottagers. I had got about half a mile from home, and, looking round, there was Tony just at my heels. I strolled along, and presently heard a squealing, and out of a clump of nettles came my cat dragging a plump rabbit. It was dead, and the cat, panting after his effort, looked up at me, as much as to say, “You’re not going to leave it here, are you?” Whereupon I remembered the saying of an old Gypsy, “If you had a dog that brought a hare or a rabbit to your feet, wouldn’t it be flying in the face of providence to refuse to take it?” So, picking up the rabbit, I put it in one of the roomy pockets of my long-tailed coat, and went on. The cat persisted in following. By and by, we drew near to a disused quarry, where the cat captured a second rabbit, which went into the other pocket of my long coat. By this time I began to feel the charm of the sport of that gentleman who sallies forth on “a shiny night at the season of the year.” The pastoral visits had now perforce to be abandoned, but on turning my face homeward, oh, horrors! there, not a hundred yards away, was a man on horseback, accompanied by a dog, and, seeing them, my cat scooted along a gulley up the hill, and was gone. I could not disappear quite so easily. However, as I did not altogether fancy a strange dog sniffing at my coat-tails, I made a detour, and the horseman passed a good way below me on the slope. You should have seen my wife smile as I plumped two nice bunnies on the kitchen table. We observed that those rabbits tasted quite as good as any you purchase at a game-dealer’s stall in the market.

Gypsies, as all the world knows, are fond of the hedgehog.

They do not keep him as a pet. They eat him, and roast hedgehog accompanied with sage and onions is a dish for an episcopal table. I never see one of these prickly fellows without being reminded of several experiences.

Once in passing along a town street on my way to the Archdeacon’s Visitation, I noticed not far ahead of me an elderly woman stepping out with a swinging stride. Her face I could not see, but she wore a tattered shawl about her shoulders, and her black hair was done up in small plaits like a horse’s mane at fair-time. “Gypsy,” said I to myself, and, hastening alongside, I greeted her in the Romany tongue. The words had a magical effect. Instantly she wheeled round and scanned me up and down with a puzzled air. There before her, wearing an orthodox collar and black coat, stood a parson who nevertheless talked like a Gypsy. Now in common with some ladies of high degree, nearly all Gypsy women enjoy a whiff of tobacco smoke. This old lady, however, declined a gift of the weed on the ground that “the brantitus” had troubled her of late, but she gladly stepped with me into a snug coffeehouse close by, where over our steaming cups we conversed aloud in the Gypsy language, to the complete mystification of the prim-looking manageress whose curiosity kept her hovering near. What that good woman’s thoughts were, I have not the faintest idea. I only know that she seemed amazed at the sight of a Gypsy in easy intercourse with a simple-looking cleric who appeared to be enjoying himself. Both, too, were speaking a queer-sounding language understandable to each other, but utterly incomprehensible to the listener. What could it all mean? Well, Gypsies at anyrate are not without a sense of humour; indeed, no one enjoys a bit of fun more than they. Taking in the situation at a glance, my Gypsy companion gave me a sly look, and, waving her hand playfully, exclaimed, “Never mind him, missis, he’s nobbut an Irishman, and can’t a boy and his mither talk a word or two in their own language?”

On my taking leave of the Gypsy mother, she bestowed this benison upon me: “The Lord love you, my son, and may you always have a big hedgehog in your mouth.”

Hedgehog, as I have said, is a dainty dish with Gypsies, and the old woman was no more than kindly wishing that there might ever be a titbit ready to slip into my mouth.

I am not likely to forget the occasion of my first actual taste of this Romany delicacy.

Charley Watland (brother of “Durham” Mike), a wide traveller, had told me much of the delights of a certain old-fashioned Midland horse-fair, concluding one of his glowing descriptions by inviting me to meet him in mid-September at this fair. Thus it came to pass that I set out one fine morning with my face towards the distant hills of Leicestershire. Of the day-long journey, I am now concerned only with its closing scenes. Pushing up a long, tiring hill, I spied over a hedge in the dusk two or three vâdê (living-vans), some low tents with flickering fires before them, and dark figures moving to and fro. With what energy I had left, I climbed over a fence and made straight for the Gypsy fires. A tall Romanitshel, leaning against a tree-bole, was singing snatches of a song in which I caught the words Beng (Devil) and puri-dai (grandmother), but, on seeing a stranger approach, he ceased. The Romany greeting, which I flung on the evening air, caused a stoutish woman to thrust her head from the doorway of the nearest caravan.

“He’s one o’ the Lees, I’ll be bound. He talks like ’em. He’s come back from over the pâni” (water). Which, being interpreted, meant that I was a “lag’s” boy returned from over-sea. The idea tickled me so that I laughed outright.

Beside the fire which was burning brightly at the feet of the tall Gypsy man, children and dogs were rolling over one another in perfect happiness, and at my elbow a lad, peering into my face, exclaimed—

“I’ll swop diklos (kerchiefs) with you, rai.”

“No, you won’t,” I replied; “mine’s silk and yours cotton.”

“Pen mandi, baw” (Tell me, friend), I inquired of the tall man under the trees, “Is Charley Watland here this time?”

“Keka, mi pal, the puro’s poger’d his hĕro (No, my brother, the old man’s broken his leg) at Peterborough. He’s got kicked by a hoss, and he’s in the infirmary.” This was bad news, for I had hoped to meet my friend here and spend the night with him.

A little way across the fields the lights of a village gleamed through the darkness, and, making my way thither, I sought for a resting-place, but in vain. Every available bed was already engaged. In and out of the taverns passed horse-dealers and rollicking Gypsies. Groups of Romany lads and lasses stood talking in the lane. Burly women with foaming jugs bumped against you in the shadows. Between the barking of dogs and the whinnying of horses, a word or two of Romany floated now and then to one’s ear.

Tired after my day in the open air, I turned into a by-lane to think matters over. A gentle wind rustled the leaves on the trees, and on the eastern horizon a growing light told of approaching moon-rise. I sat on a fence and watched Old Silver appear above the hills. Away from the village, I began to notice the sights and sounds of night. An owl on velvety wing fluttered by. Little birds cheeped in the thicket behind me. Field-mice squeaked in the grass on the bank. I began to feel cut off from the world. What was I to do? Walk about all night? Make a bed on the bracken in a neighbouring wood? Renew my search for a more civilized couch in one or other of the adjacent villages? Tramp down the long dusty road to a small town some few miles off, where I knew of more than one snug hostelry? Why indeed? Was I not out for adventure? I resolved to ask the Gypsies to give me a bed. Therefore, without further ado, I slipped through a gap in the hedge, and made tracks for the Gypsy fires already mentioned.

“Hello, here’s the rai back again.” It was the tall Gypsy’s wife who spoke. My tale was soon told, and I was promptly offered a corner under Arthur West’s tilt-hood placed tent-wise on the ground. Now that my mind was at ease, I sat me down by the fire near which a savoury smell of supper arose. It was astonishing how quickly we cleaned the bones of several bird-like objects set before us.

“Did you ever taste of these little things afore?”

“Well, whatever they are, I shouldn’t mind if they had been larger.”

At this they all laughed aloud.

“Dawdi, the rai doesn’t jin he’s haw’d hotshwitshi” (Fancy, the gentleman doesn’t know he’s eaten hedgehog).

So this was the much-vaunted Romany dish, nor did it disappoint me. The blended flavours of pheasant and sucking-pig are still present to my memory as I recall that moonlit meal washed down by a jug of brown ale.

On awaking next morning, I realized the truth of the saying, “Gypsies get something straight from heaven which is never known to people who sleep in stuffy houses and get up to wash in warm water.”

When I recall awakenings in lodgings with the bedclothes, valances, curtains, falderals, antimacassars, all heavy with suggestions of humanity, I marvel no more at the Gypsy’s choice of a bed of crisp bracken or sweet straw, with maybe a wisp of dried river-mint or wild thyme mingled with it.

Walking bare-foot in the dewy grass with the Gypsy children, we made our toilet together in the open, with the light airs of the wold playing about us. Then came breakfast by the wood fire, and during the meal my host’s donkey affectionately put his cold nose on the bare of my neck. In a little while we stood on the common where the fair was in full swing, and, strolling among the horses and dealers, I spied a curly-haired son of old Horace Boswell, just arrived from Leicester, who found time to tell me a funny tale about his father.

Since early morn Horace had been riding a lively horse, and, dismounting, handed the reins to a pal and walked a few yards into the fair. As he was looking about him, he lighted upon George Smith of Coalville, who, arching his bushy eyebrows and stroking his great beard, stood shocked at the sight of a Gypsy walking unsteadily. As a matter of fact, Horace’s legs had not yet thrown off the cramp of many hours’ riding on a skittish animal. When solemn George opened his mouth it was to ask a question—

“Do you drink beer, my good man?”

“Well, my kind gentleman,” replied Horace, “afore I answers that question, I’d reely like to know whether it’s a simple inquiry or an inwitation.”

This was too much for the worthy philanthropist who, turning swiftly on his heel, went his way swinging his Gladstone-bag and gingham.

About the middle of the afternoon I sought out my hospitable friend Arthur West before quitting the fair, and, looking me straight in the eyes, he said, “Are you quite sure that you have enough lova (money) to see you home? For if I thought you hadn’t, I should chuck a handful on the drom (road) and leave it for you to pick up.”

How shall we ever get you to understand the spirit of these wanderers; you who coddle yourselves in hot, close rooms; who are wedded to the life of a mill-horse jogging in convention’s dusty track, and whose souls are imprisoned within the dimensions of a red-ochred flower-pot?

CHAPTER V
A GYPSY BAPTISM—ROMANY NAMES

Quitting the Wolds, described in the preceding chapter, I took up my abode in a large village situated on Lincoln Heath, where I had further opportunities of pursuing my Gypsy studies round about home.

In a sinuous turfy lane which ran behind our house, the Gypsies would pitch their camp from time to time, and one of these wandering families conceived the notion of renting a cottage in the village. In my mind’s eye I can see that little house, wearing a lost, desolate air. It stood in a walled-in yard, where loose stones lay strewn, and the ridge of the red-tiled roof sunken in the middle threatened a collapse.

Unaccustomed to sleeping under a roof, and a rickety one at that, the Gypsies fled in alarm from their chamber one wild, boisterous night, fearing lest the chimney-pots should tumble in upon them. Near by stood their green caravan, and snugly abed therein they felt secure from all harm. Next day a timid rap came at the Rectory door, and a black-eyed girl whispered in my ear that her mother would like the baby, a few hours old, to be christened. This I did, and a day or two afterwards I was agreeably surprised to meet the Gypsy mother with her baby taking the fresh air on the high road. What mother in any other rank of life could carry her child in the open so soon after its birth?

“It’s a way we have,” said Walter Heron, when explaining to me that a plate, cup, and saucer are set apart for the mother’s use during the four weeks following the birth of a child. The vessels are then destroyed in accordance with an old puerperal tabu. This custom is still observed in all good Romany families.

Tom Lee, an English Gypsy, broke up a loaf of bread and strewed the crumbs around his tent when his son Bendigo was born, for some of the old-time Gypsies hold the notion that bread possesses a protective magic against evil influences. Seated one day in the tent of Bendigo Lee on the South Shore at Blackpool, I questioned him about his father’s practice. “In the days when I was born,” he replied, “there were people that could do hurt by looking at you, and I s’pose my dadus (father) sprinkled the crumbs lest any evil person going by should cast harm upon me.”

A distinct survival of the belief in the evil eye.

Romany “fore,” or Christian names, [53] are often peculiar, and afford much material for reflection.

Whence come such names as Khulai, Maireni, Malini, Mori, Shuri? In these names Sir Richard Temple discerns Indian forms or terminations. The Anglo-Romany names, Fenela, Siari, and Trenit, have been identified by Mr. H. T. Crofton with the Continental forms, Vennel, Cihari, and Tranitza, the last being a common feminine Gypsy name in Hungary.

Euphonious and out-of-the-way names are irresistible to the Gypsy.

“What metal is that box made of, sir?” asked a Gypsy mother on seeing a gentleman’s cigarette-case.

“Aluminium,” was the reply.

“What a beautiful name for my gell’s baby!”

According to Charles G. Leland, a Gypsy father, hearing two gentlemen talking about Mount Vesuvius, was greatly impressed by the name, and consulted with them as to the propriety of giving it to his little boy.

Gypsies dislike to be addressed by their peculiar “fore” or Christian names in the presence of gawjê; hence to the postman, Ènos become Amos, Fèmi—Amy, and Poley—George, and so on. As a rule, you find a Gypsy is unwilling to impart his true name to a stranger. May not this reluctance be due to a lingering subconscious belief that the possession of one’s true name would enable a stranger to work harmful spells upon the owner?

Time was when the belief was widely spread that the utterance of a man’s true name drew him to the speaker. Medieval records are full of legendary accounts of spirits who were summoned by the casual pronunciation of their names. Until lately there were peasants in the North of Ireland and Arran who absolutely refused to tell their names to a stranger because such knowledge, it was believed, would enable him to “call” them, no matter how far he was from them, and whenever he cared to do so. They also believed that any spell worked on the written name would have the same effect as if worked on the owner.

It is a fact that not a few Gypsy surnames are identical with those of ancient noble families, e.g. Boswell, or Bosville (sometimes contracted to Boss), Gray, Heron, Hearne, or Herne, Lees, Lovells, and Stanleys. It has been surmised, by way of explanation, that the Gypsies soon after their arrival in this country adopted the surnames of the owners of the estates on which particular hordes usually encamped, or the names of those landed families who afforded protection to the persecuted wanderers.

Speaking of the Gypsies, Gilbert White of Selborne, says, “One of these tribes calls itself by the noble name of Stanley.” This mention of the Stanleys reminds me that once on Gonerby Hill, near Grantham, on the Great North Road, I met a young man who looked like a mechanic out of work, yet his bearing was that of a Gypsy. In our talk he admitted that he was of Romany blood. He had been a horseman in Lord George Sanger’s circus, but something had gone wrong and he was thrown out of employ. At first he gave his name as Richardson (not a Gypsy name), but he afterwards told me that his grandfather, a Stanley, had been transported, for which reason the family assumed the name of Richardson.

CHAPTER VI
I MAKE A NEW ACQUAINTANCE

For several years I was curate-in-charge of a parish abutting upon the Great North Road, and during that time I used to meet many Gypsies on the famous highway. There passed along it members of the Boswell clan, making their way from Edinburgh to London; the dark Herons, after spending the summer months in the Northern Counties, came by this route to their winter quarters at Nottingham; a lawless horde of Lovells also knew this road well. Sometimes these Gypsies would turn aside from the dusty highway for a brief rest in the green lanes across an adjacent river, but they rarely tarried longer than a day. With one of these Gypsies I became intimately acquainted, and this is how our friendship began.

One May morning I had been strolling along the aforesaid road, and, turning towards the river where it is spanned by an old mill-bridge, I loitered there in expectation of the arrival of a pack of otter-hounds, visitors from another county; for complaints had long been accumulating to the effect that Lutra had been making depredations among the fish, game, and poultry all along the reaches of the river. Adjoining the bridge was a watermill where often might be heard the humming of the great wheel and the roar of foam-flecked water. Mellowed by time’s gentle touch, the irregular outlines of the building seemed verily as if arranged to be imaged on canvas; timbers and weathered stones were everywhere mottled with rosettes of orange and grey lichen, and when the sunbeams warmed the tints and tones of the old mill into rich masses of colour you experienced a thrill which made you wish to repeat it.

A little way off, our river was crossed by a shallow ford rarely used by vehicular traffic, which mostly passed by the bridge. Once a year, however, the miller closed the bridge in order to preserve a right-of-way through his yard, and on this occasion toll was taken of every cart, while a free way was allowed by the ford. But the astute fellow usually arranged that the closing of the bridge should coincide with a market day at the nearest town, and he would choose a time when the river was swollen by flood-water beyond its ordinary dimensions, thus rendering the ford a dangerous crossing.

After waiting awhile, a murmur of deep voices broke upon my ear, as with a rush and a splash about a score of bonny, rough-coated dogs burst into view round a bend in the stream. It was not in my plans to follow the dogs, so when the pack and its excited companions had gone by, I proceeded leisurely along a lane leading towards the green uplands looking down upon the valley.

A little way up the lane I came upon two dark-featured lads, and, going up to one of them who was tacking strips of straw-plait upon the top of a three-legged table, I said—

“You seem very busy this morning.”

“We must do something for a living.”

“You’re certainly a good hand at your business. How long are you stopping here?”

“That’s more nor I know.” (This with a shrewd look at me from top to toe.) “Ax grandfather, up yonder wi’ the hosses.”

Higher up the lane, and almost hidden by outlying tangles of bramble and wild-rose, sat a man of sixty or more, puffing tobacco smoke from his black clay, and near him on the wayside three horses ripped the tender grasses.

Looking up at me with a start, the man said—

“Well, you fairly took me by surprise, sir. For a wonder I never heard you a-coming. I must be getting deaf.”

“Romanitshel?” (Gypsy) I queried.

“Âvali, mi tshavo” (Yes, my son), he replied; “you’s been among our people, that’s plain, or you wouldn’t talk like you do. Mebbe you’s heard tell o’ Jonathan Boswell—that’s me. But I must be off now with these here hosses to the smithy. We’s beshin akai (stopping here) for a day or two. Our wagon’s in the kitshima (tavern) yard just past the mill.”

“Well, Jonathan, I want you to bring one of those Gypsy-tables the boys are making to my place this afternoon; don’t fail to come. I shall dik avrî for tîro mui about trin ora” (look out for your face about three o’clock).

“Right, I’ll be there, raia.”

In due course the Gypsy presented himself at my door in company with his two grandsons, and among them they carried three tables. I had only asked for one, but Jonathan was such a “find” that I gladly purchased all the articles and bade the little party follow me into the garden. The two grandsons displayed a remarkable knowledge of trees, which they were able to identify not merely by their foliage, but by the character of their bark. Wild birds they knew by note and flight as well as by plumage. There is so much a Gypsy boy knows about nature.

How meagre, by contrast, is the information possessed by the average County Council schoolboy; which reminds me that I was once giving an object-lesson to a class of fifth-standard children attending our village school. We were seated on a river bank whose insect life and botanical treasures I had been pointing out to an interested group of listeners. As nothing had been said about the scaly denizens of the stream, I concluded my talk by putting a question to the entire class.

“Hands up, those who can tell me the names of any fish to be found in this river.”

Quickly a dozen pink palms were uplifted, and I could see that several lips were bursting with information. Imagine my surprise when I was informed—“red-herring, sprats, and mackerel.”

On the following evening I went across the fields to see my friends by the watermill. The amber light of sunset was falling upon green hedge and rippling river. From a thorn bush a nightingale jug-jugged deliciously. There was poetry in the air. Nor was it dispelled by the discovery that my friends had drawn their “house on wheels” into the grassy lane leading down to the ford.

Seated on a mound of sand, Jonathan was chatting with a stranger who had the looks of an Irishman. I joined them, but no sooner had I dropped a word or two of Romany than the stranger arose, saying, “I don’t understand your talk, so I’d better be going.” He then left us, and, seeing he had gone away, old Fazenti, Jonathan’s wife, stepped down from the living-wagon, and our discourse became considerably enlivened by her presence.

Speaking of dukerin (fortune-telling), she said, “It’ll go on while the world lasts,” which was Fazzy’s way of saying that the credulous will be in the world after the poor have left it. “It’s the hawking-basket that gi’s us our chance, don’t you dik (see)? I takes care never to be without my licence, and the muskro (policeman) would have to get up wery early to catch old Fazzy asleep. Did I ever have any mulo-mas? [61] Many’s the time I’ve had a bit. In spring, when lambs are about, that’s the time for mulo-mas.

“A good country for hedgehogs is this, but we don’t eat ’em in the spring. The back end of the year is the best time for ’em; there’s a bit of flesh on ’em then. When you find one, if he’s rolled up in a ball, you rub his back with a stick right down his spine, and he’ll open out fast enough. Then you hit him hard on the nose, and he’s as dead as a door nail. The old way of cooking him was to cover him with clay and bake him in the fire. When he was cooked you tapped the clay ball, and the prickles and skin came away with the clay. Nowadays we burn down the bristles, then shave ’em off, draw and clean him and roast him on a spit before a hot fire. He’s wery good with puvengris (potatoes), sage, and onions. Bouris (snails) are good to eat in winter. You get them in a hard frost from behind old stumps of trees. You put salt on ’em and they make fine broth. Wery strengthening is bouri-zimen” (snail broth).

While we were conversing, Jonathan’s grandsons passed by with a lurcher.

“A useful dog, that, I should think,” said I.

“Kushto yek sî dova for shushiaw and kanengrê” (A good one is that for rabbits and hares), replied the old man. “I minds well the day I bought him off a man with a pot-cart as was stopping along with us. We’d got leave from a farmer to draw into a lane running between some clover fields, and we were just sitting down to a cup o’ tea when a keeper comes along and says—

“‘I’m afraid some of you fellows have been up to mischief, because there’s a hare in a snare along this hedge.’

“‘Then it’s somebody else’s snare, not ours,’ I says, ‘for we’s only just got here, and yon farmer as give us leave to stop will tell you the same if you ask him.’

“‘Well, see here,’ says the keeper, ‘there’s a rabbit for your pot. Keep a sharp look out, and mind you let me know if anybody comes to fetch that hare. There’s my cottage up yonder.’

“Then he went away, and would you believe it, a bit after the moon got up we see a man coming across the field and straight to that snare he went, and as he was taking the hare out of it, there was a tap on his shoulder from the keeper. Now, who do you think the man was that got catched so nicely? It was the willage policeman. And that night I bought that here jukel (dog), I did, and me and the dog had a fine time among the shushiaw (rabbits) after the keeper and the policeman had gone away. About a week after, the muskro (policeman) had to appear in court, and a wery poor figure he cut afore the pukinger (magistrate). You see, he was catched proper, and couldn’t get out of it no-how. The pot-cart man and me had to go up as witnesses.”

“You’ll know this countryside well, I expect. Do you ever spend the night in Dark Lane, as I believe they call it?”

“One time we used to stop there a lot, rai, but they won’t let us now. How’smiver, we hatsh odoi (encamp there) for a râti (night) at odd times, spite of everybody.”

This remark was accompanied by a half-smothered chuckle from Jonathan, who, while filling his pipe from my tobacco pouch, seemed to be ruminating upon a reminiscence which presently came out.

The said lane lies pleasantly between a neighbouring village and the river, and about the month of May the grass down there begins to be sweet, but woe to the Gypsies whom the constable finds encamped thereabouts.

Jonathan went on to tell how he and his party once passed a night very happily there when the may-buds were bursting. And this is how it was done.

In a wayside tavern the Gypsy had heard it whispered that the County Police had gone to the town for the annual inspection, which involved a temporary absence of the constables from their respective localities. But, to make quite sure of this, on arriving at the village of F—, Jonathan sought out a certain cottage and thus addressed himself to a constable’s wife—

“Is the sergeant at home?”

“No, my man. What do you want him for?”

“A pony of mine has gone astray, and I want him to let me know if he hears anything about it. Perhaps he’ll be at home to-night?”

“He won’t, I’m afraid.”

“Thank you, ma’am.”

Thus Jonathan camped down Dark Lane with impunity.

One morning shortly after my meeting with Jonathan, a Gypsy mother called at my Rectory. She led her black-eyed, five-year-old boy by the hand. Brown as a berry, the handsome little fellow would have served admirably for an artist’s model, and his mother had many pleasing touches of Gypsy colour about her attire. From beneath a bright red diklo (kerchief) which she wore, a few black curls straggled out on to her forehead, and a gay bodice showed under her green shawl. The woman said that she had heard so much of me from her father—Jonathan Boswell—that she had come on purpose to see me. I invited her into the kitchen, and over bread and cheese and ale we chatted.

“Ain’t we all delated, raia, come to think of it? There’s a Man above as made us all.”

Quickly I made friends with the little boy, and at my request his mother afforded our household no small delight by leaving her son with us for the day. The tiny lad was entirely unaccustomed to house ways, and his behaviour was a study. On seeing a Christmas card with the Christ-child lying in the manger guarded by a white-winged angel, he exclaimed, “I know what that is” (pointing to the heavenly visitant); “we often sees ’em flying over the fields. It’s a seagull.”

With great readiness he joined in the games of my children, such as shuttlecock and battledore, skipping, and the like. Sitting at a table for a meal was evidently a novel experience for the little chap, and it was amusing to see him slip off his chair and squat on the hearthrug, putting his plate on his knee as though a Gypsy boy ought not to do exactly as the gawjê, and he used his fingers freely in lieu of fork and spoon. After the meal we sat round the fire, and talked of his life on the road.

“I found a hen’s nest in the hedge-bottom, this morning, I did.”

“Any eggs in?” I asked.

“Yes; three.”

“Did you take them?”

“No, I left ’em—till there was more.”

Then I told him fairy tales of green woods, ghosts, and goblins, and he became excited, springing once or twice from his chair, as if he would like to have danced about the room.

“Oh, I knows a lot about mulos” (ghosts), said the little Gypsy. “There’s different sorts—milk-white ’uns and coal-black ’uns. When we’re abed at nights, they come screaming round our wagon and flapping at the windows. My daddy gets his gun and shoots, then we hears ’em no more for a bit. But they are soon back agen, and I’m that frit when I hears ’em, I can’t sleep. When mammy’s going out with her basket of a morning, and daddy’s gone somewhere to see about a hoss, I daren’t go far into the big wood agen our stopping-place, ’cos of the black pig what lives there. Daddy has seen it, and nobody can’t kill it, for you can bang a stick right through it without hurting it. Mammy allus says, ‘Don’t you never go into that wood, else the black pig’ll get you.’”

We showed him picture books, and, pointing to an ass and a foal, he said, “My daddy’s got a little donkey just like that, three months old, and when it’s bigger I shall ride on it, like that man’s doing in the pictur’.”

We rambled in the Rectory garden, and he quickly found a hedgehog in its nest. All the senses of this little fellow were extremely alert.

In the early evening his mother returned for him, and their meeting was a pretty sight. Placing her hawking-basket on the ground, she picked up her laddie in her arms and kissed him. Slowly the pair walked away, casting more than one backward glance at the house.

A few days later, news reached me of a Gypsy arrival in a green lane about a mile from my Rectory. I therefore hastened across the fields, and, long before sighting the party, whiffs of wood-smoke, which the breeze brought my way, told that they were already encamped. On reaching the spot, Farmer W—’s best bullock pasture, I spied Jonathan’s cart along with other vehicles drawn up with their backs towards a high hedge. There were fires on the grass, and from family groups merry voices rang out on the air. In the lane a troop of children were hovering around a little black donkey, a pretty young foal, which allowed them to fondle it to their hearts’ content. What a picture it was which greeted me—tree-boles, tilt-carts, and hedgerows lit up by the fading sunlight, and the blue smoke of the fires wafted about the undulating field dipping down to the river. Quickly I dropped into a corner by one of the fires, and the mirth was just at its height when up rode Farmer W— on his chestnut cob.

“Where’s that scamp of a Boswell?” he shouted angrily.

Jonathan stepped forward, hanging his head somewhat.

“What does all this mean?” asked the farmer. “I thought it was only for yourself that you begged leave to stop here. Who the divil’s all this gang?”

“I really couldn’t help it,” said Jonathan. “They stuck to me, and would come in. They’re all delations of mine, don’t you see, sir?”

A look from the Gypsy made me step forward and plead for the party, which I did with success.

About the middle of June I was again in Old Boswell’s company. Under a hedge pink with wild-roses, we sat smoking and waiting for the fair to begin on Stow Green, a South Lincolnshire common. Already horses were assembling and dealers were beginning to arrive in all sorts of conveyances. Hot sunshine blazed down upon the common, whose only building was a wretched-looking lockup, around which lounged several representatives of the county constabulary. Wandering in and about the motley throng, I caught a whisper going the round that a fight was to take place before the end of the day. It had been explained to me that this fight was not the result of any quarrel arising at the fair. It had been arranged long beforehand. Whenever a difference arose between two families, champions were told off to fight the matter out at Stow Green Fair.

Somewhere about the middle of the afternoon, as the business began to slacken, a number of people were seen to move to one corner of the common. Evidently something was afoot. I wandered across and found a crowd consisting mainly of Gypsies, and in order to get a better view, I climbed upon a trestle table outside a booth. In the middle of a ring of people stood two of the dark Grays, stripped to the waist, and, at a signal given by an elderly man, the combatants put up their “maulers” and the fight began. It was by no means a one-sided contest, the men being well matched with regard to weight and strength. Blow followed blow in quick succession, and at the first drawing of blood the Gypsy onlookers became excited, and the entire crowd began to surge to and fro. Of course, the police hurried up, but soon perceived that it was useless to interfere.

“Let ’em have it out,” cried many voices. After a breathing space, the fighters again closed in, and, parting a little, one of them stepped back a pace or two and, springing towards his opponent, dealt him a heavy blow which determined the battle, and all was over. At this juncture, the table on which I and others stood suddenly gave way, and we were precipitated to the grass, but no harm was done, beyond a few bruises and the shattering of sundry jugs and glasses.

An echo of a fighting song haunts me as I recall this Gypsy contest on Stow Green—

“Whack it on the grinders, thump it on the jaw,
Smack it on the tater-trap a dozen times or more.
Slap it on the snuff-box, make the claret fly,
Thump it on the jaw again, never say die.”

After the fair was over I sat under a hedge and took tea with Jonathan and Fazenti.

A hare’s back adorned my plate.

“Why, mother, I didn’t know that this was in season.”

“My dinelo (simpleton), don’t you jin (know) it’s always in season with the likes of us?”

CHAPTER VII
THE BLACKPOOL GYPSYRY

It has been said that if an architect, a caterer, and a poet were commissioned to construct out of our existing south and east coast resorts a place which, in its appeal to the million, might compare with Blackpool, they would utterly fail, a saying not to be questioned for a moment.

Yet the sight which thrilled me most, as I beheld it years ago, was not the cluster of gilded pleasure-palaces in the town, but the gay Gypsyry squatting on the sand-dunes at the extremity of the South Shore. Living-vans of green and gold with their flapping canvas covers; domed tents whose blankets of red and grey had faded at the touch of sun and wind; boarden porches and outgrowths of a fantastic character, the work of Romany carpenters; unabashed advertisements announcing Gypsy queens patronized by duchesses and lords; bevies of black-eyed, wheedling witches eager to pounce upon the stroller into Gypsydom; and troops of fine children, shock-headed and jolly—all these I beheld in the Gypsyry which is now no more. “Life enjoyed to the last” might well have been its epitaph.

Those were the days of Old Sarah Boswell and her nephews Kenza and Oscar; Johnny and Wasti Gray; Elijah Heron and his son Poley; Bendigo and Morjiana Purum; the vivacious Robinsons; Dolferus Petulengro and Noarus Tâno; some of whom, alas, “have joined the people whom no true Romany will call by name.”

Hot June sunshine flooded the sandhills on the afternoon of my entry into the encampment, which, by the way, was made strategetically from the rear. Thus it was that I lighted upon the retired tent of the oldest occupants of the Gypsyry. Unlike the alert and expectant Romany mothers and maids who hovered about this Gypsy town’s front gate, Ned Boswell’s widow sat drowsing at the tent door, overpowered by the midsummer heat. I was about to turn away, intending to revisit the old lady later on, when her son Alma, the lynx-eyed, popped upon me from round the corner, and in a sandy hollow a little way off we were soon deep in conversation.

“Now, rashai,” said Alma, after we had talked awhile, “there’s one thing I would like to ask you. Where do you think us Romanitshels reely origin’d from?”

Here I was confronted by a question which has been asked throughout the ages, and addressed to myself how many times?

Who are the Gypsies, and where did they come from? Bulky tomes have been filled with scholarly speculations upon these questions, and so varied have been the conclusions arrived at that we appear to be no nearer to the solution of the mystery than when about the year 1777 the German Rudiger first made known to the world that the Gypsies spoke an Indian dialect, which discovery is said “to have injured more than it served in the quest after the origin of the Gypsies, because it has prevented scholars from searching for it.” Taking philology for our guide, we may believe that the ancestors of our Gypsies tarried for centuries in North-West India, a region which they quitted with their faces set towards the west not later than about 1000 A.D. To quote the words of an authority [73] on the linguistic side of the problem: “Their language proves that they once inhabited Northern India, but as no Indian writers have left any documents describing this people, their mode of life in India, and the most interesting point of all, why they emigrated, must for ever remain a matter for conjecture. It is, however, surprising what can be proved from our present knowledge of their language, which, it is generally admitted, must rank as an independent eighth among the seven modern Indian languages of the Aryan stock, based on Sanskrit. To begin with, the grammatical peculiarities of the language of the Gypsies resemble those of the modern Aryan languages of India so closely that it is impossible not to believe that they were developed side by side. Comparing Gypsy and Hindi, for example, we find that their declensions are based exactly on the same principle, that neither has a real genitive case, that both decline their adjectives only when used as nouns. Now it is generally held that these modern forms came slowly into existence throughout the eleventh century, when the old synthetical structure of the Sanskrit was broken up and thrown into confusion, but not quite lost, while the modern auxiliary verbs and prepositions were as yet hardly fully established in their stead. Therefore, it is extremely unlikely that the Gypsies left India before the tenth century, when they could have carried away with them, so to speak, the germs of the new construction, absorbed on Indian soil.”

From the words they borrowed from Persia, Armenia, and Greece, we know that the wanderers passed through these countries on their way westward, but, since no Arabic or Coptic words are found in the Gypsy tongue, we infer that they were never in Egypt. The theory of the Egyptian origin of the Romanitshels probably arose from legends which they themselves set afloat.

Two stories were repeated by the Gypsies. They said that they were Egyptian penitents on a seven years’ pilgrimage. The Saracens had attacked them in Egypt, and, having surrendered to their enemies, they became Saracens themselves and denied Christ. Now, as a penance, they were ordered to travel for seven years without sleeping in a bed. A second story was that their exile was a punishment for the sin of having refused hospitality to Joseph and the Virgin Mary when they fled into Egypt with the newborn Christ-child to escape the anger of Herod.

Associated with the Gypsies are other legends which may have been invented by them for similar purposes. An old tradition asserts that Caspar, one of the three Magi, was a Gypsy, and that it was he who (as their ruler) first converted them to the Christian religion. The Lithuanian Gypsies say that stealing has been permitted in their favour by God because the Gypsies, being present at the Crucifixion, stole one of the four nails, and therefore God allows them to steal, and it is not accounted a sin to them.

Needless to say, the foregoing statements were not delivered to Alma Boswell. Of their actual history the Anglo-Romany folk know nothing, but this does not prevent them from holding some curious notions about themselves. So, in response to Alma’s question about the origin of the Gypsies, I replied that great scholars believed his race to have come from India.

“Oh, I think they’re wrong,” said Alma. “Far more likely we came from the land of Bethlehem. Being a rashai (parson), you’ll know the Bible, I suppose, from cover to cover. Well, you’ve heard of the man called Cain. Now, don’t the Old Book say that he went away and married a black-eyed camper-gal, one of our roving folks? I reckons we sprang from them. We was the first people what the dear Lord made, and mebbe we shall be the last on earth. When all the rest is wore out, there’ll still be a few of our folks travelling with tents and wagons.”

Such was Alma’s idea of the origin of the Gypsies.

“But there,” he continued, “you must read my Uncle Westarus’s big book all about our people. There was a doctor and a lawyer, wery kind gentlemen, real bawrê raiaw (swells), who used to talk to my uncle for hours on end, and they wrote down every word he said, and then he wrote them a sight of letters, wery long ones, and they are all of ’em in print. So if you reads that book, you’ll larn all as is’ known about us.”

Alma’s Uncle Westarus was certainly a remarkable Gypsy, possessing quite a library, which he carried about with him on his travels. It is on record that at the age of fifty-five his library included several volumes of fiction, history, poetry, and science, a large Bible, a Church of England Prayer Book, Burns’s Justice, as well as English, Greek, and Latin dictionaries.

For the information of those who may not already know it, the volume designated by Alma “my uncle’s book” is a most valuable vade mecum for Gypsy students entitled The Dialect of the English Gypsies, by Dr. Bath Smart and Mr. H. T. Crofton.

There was a strong dash of Gypsy pride in Alma’s remark that the Boswells were the only real Gypsies left. “These others all about us are kek tatsho” (not genuine), he said, with a wave of the hand; “they’re only half-breeds.”

“But,” I queried, “are not the Herons and Lees good Gypsies?” Then, veering from his first statement, he admitted that the families I had named might be allowed a place among the old roots.

Then followed a discussion about grades of Gypsy blood. These were classified by Alma—

1. The Black Romanitshels, “the real thing.”

2. The Didakais, or half-breeds, who pronounce the Romany words dik akai (look here) as did akai.

3. Hedge-crawlers, or mumpers. “There’s a lot of ’em up London way,” said Alma. “We’d scorn to go near the likes of them—a tshikli (dirty) lot, not Gypsies at all.”