Gipsying in this country comes up before us in various forms, enough to send a cold, thrilling shudder through one’s nature. A friend whom I know well, in Leicester, told me only the other day that one of her distant relations at Greetham, in Rutlandshire, had SOLD, some year or so ago, his dark-eyed and dark-haired pretty girl of about twelve summers to a gang of gipsies for TWO SHILLINGS AND SIXPENCE AND A GALLON OF BEER, and the poor lost creature is now tramping and travelling the country, no one knows where. This poor girl’s mother is living in comfortable service in Leicester. One can hardly imagine a husband and wife, father and mother, so utterly lost to all natural feeling as to sell their child for half a crown; but so it is, and no doubt she is making money for the gipsy scoundrels and inhuman brutes. My heart often bleeds for the little lost gipsy girl, concerning whom slap-dash gipsy song-writers can call forth thrills of momentary pleasurable excitement from sensual gipsy admirers as they pass round the “loving cup.”
I often wonder what kind of song it is the poor child’s inhuman mother sings to while away the pleasurable duties of her station and the silent hours of the night; and while her offspring lies like a dog crouched on a heap of straw, half starved, dressed in rags, filth, and vermin, in some tent at the bottom of some dark lane by the side of a wood, listening with wide-open eyes to the screeching of game and weazels, the howling of the wind, and the beating of the hail and rain against her thin midnight shelter from stormy blasts.
While in Scotland a friend told me that recently he was in a hairdresser’s shop, and while he was undergoing shampooing and a scenting process, a poor, half-frozen, half-naked, Scotch gipsy girl, with dishevelled hair, came, with a small tin can in her hand, begging with tears in her eyes for some hot water. My friend was struck with the poor gipsy girl’s sorrowful, soul-mourning condition and request, and he asked her what she wanted the hot water for. “Please, my good gentleman,” said the girl, tremblingly, “my mother’s hair is frozen to the ground, and I want a little hot water to loosen it with. Mother can’t get up till it is loosened, and there is no one else in the tent to fetch the water and to get her up but me, sir.” What a tale of sorrow did the poor child relate. How sadly true is this of the gipsies and show people, and other travelling children all over our highly favoured and heavenly exalted country to-day. Our gipsies, by their own wrong-doings, lying, thieving, poaching, cheating, fortune-telling, idleness, profanity, sabbath-breaking, and other deadly sins, have bound themselves to the ground under our eyes, and we have stood by with our hands in our pockets, winking, blinking, and chuckling at their heartrending condition. Some thirty thousand gipsy children have, for the last three hundred and fifty years, received from door to door cuffs, kicks, crumbs, crusts, smiles, curses, and flattery, but have never, except in a flickering way, had extended to them the hand of practical help and sympathy. They have lived on our commons, in our lanes, by the side of our woods, in our dark, black alleys, in our prisons and workhouses. The little seedlings of hope that God has planted in the breasts of the poor gipsy children, we have, instead of encouraging them, trampled upon, and the little tender buds and blades as they peeped forth we have trodden down.