I had not been watching alone all this time: when I had been about half an hour on the spot I had a visitor, a small miserable-looking New Forest boy; he came walking towards me with a little crooked stick in his hand, and asked me in a low, husky voice if I had seen a pony in that part of the Forest. I told him sharply not to come too near as his steps would disturb a spider I was watching. It did not seem to surprise him that I was there by myself watching a spider, but creeping up he subsided gently on the heath by my side and began watching with me. At intervals when there was a lull in the excitement of the spiders I could spare time for a glance at my poor little companion. He was probably eleven or twelve years old, but his stature was that of a boy of eight--a small, stunted creature, meanly dressed, with light-coloured lustreless hair, pale-blue eyes, and a weary sad expression on his pale face. Yet he called himself a gipsy! But the south of England gipsies are a mixed and degenerate lot. They are now so incessantly harried by the authorities that the best of them settle down in the villages, while those who keep to the old ways and vagrant open-air life are joined by tramps and wastrels of every shade of colour. This little fellow had little or no Romany blood in his watery veins.
He told me that his people were camping not far off, and that the party consisted of his parents with six (the half-dozen youngest) of their thirteen children. { 159} They had a pony and trap; but the pony had got away during the night, and the father and two or three of the children were out looking for it in different directions. We talked a little at intervals, and I found him curiously ignorant concerning the wild life of the Forest. He assured me that he had never seen the cuckoo, but he had heard of its singular habits, and was anxious to know how big a bird it was, also its colour. In some trees near us a wood-wren was uttering its sorrowful little wailing note of anxiety, and when I asked him what bird it was, he answered "a sparrer." Nevertheless he seemed to feel a dim sort of interest in the spiders we were watching, and at length our intermittent conversation ceased altogether. When at last, after a long silence, I spoke, he did not answer, and glancing round I found that he had gone to sleep. Lying there with eyes closed, his pale face on the bright green turf, he looked almost corpse-like. Even his lips were colourless. Getting up, I placed a penny piece on the turf beside his little crooked stick, so that on awaking he should have a gleam of happiness in his poor little soul, and went softly away. But he was sleeping very soundly, for when after going a couple of hundred yards I looked back he was still lying motionless on the same spot.