“Oh the wandering waifs and strays, In hiding day and night, And lacking verdant shelter, On their lives a blight; Aye, creeping far and farther From the eyes of men; If they find a lodging, ’Tis in some horrid den!”
A little later on I went to Daventry and found a man—a tradesman—in the market-place, exhibiting a deformed pony rather than follow his own trade. Both man and wife could read and write—in fact, the woman had once been a Sunday-school teacher—but not one of their five children could read a sentence.
Only the other day, our good vicar’s respected wife, Mrs. Darnell, in company with her niece, Miss Stansfeld, took shelter in a cottage, rather than face two most repulsive-looking men and one woman with seven children, who were tramping the country in a most wretched and forlorn condition. Their only home consisted in an old handcart full of rags, upon which were perched, on a most bitterly cold and wet day, three poor gipsy children; and the other four children were trudging by the side of the hand-cart scarcely able to get one foot before the other. Their shoeless footprints seemed to cry out loud for help. Many gipsies camp upon Cannock Chase from time to time, and such is their character that people passing that way in dark hours generally take the precaution to be armed with pistols, and to have dogs by their sides.
Think about it lightly as we may, the evils of gipsying are on the increase in this country. Fortune-telling and deceit are taking fast hold upon the “silly girls and young chaps.” Very recently the _Daily News_ reported a case in Dorsetshire where two gipsy women induced a dairyman’s wife to part with her sovereigns for a sheep’s heart studded with pins in mystic patterns outside, and crammed inside with bright farthings. The heart was to be hung in the chimney till Easter, when it was to be taken out and all the farthings to be turned into sovereigns. The woman’s husband broke the “spell” by pulling the heart out of the chimney before Easter. The _Graphic_, in the spring of 1882, reports a case of a “white witch” at Plymouth, who declared that the whole crew of a smack were under a “spell”—and the crew believed it—which “spell” only the gipsy witch could remove, and of course for money only. The _British Workman_ for October, 1882, shows a little of some of the evils of fortune-telling. At the Bradford county police-court recently, Delia Young, a gipsy, was charged with fortune-telling. For some weeks the prisoner, with a number of other gipsies, had been staying at a village named Wyke, and hundreds of persons of all ages and both sexes had visited her. Her fees ranged from ls. to 5s., the latter sum being charged when a “planet was ruled.” It was stated that her earnings must have averaged several guineas a day for many months. For the defence it was contended that the prisoner and her family had told fortunes at Blackpool during the season for twenty years. She was fined £5 and costs, with the alternative of two months’ imprisonment. The money was paid.
