The woman had been a parlour-maid for three years in the family of R—, at Sowerby Bridge, in Yorkshire, where this family hails from. She seemed a hard-working woman, and one who tried hard to make her way, but possessed with an idea that she should like to see some of the London gipsies. No doubt by this time she is making her way there.
The hardships this poor woman and children had to pass through during the last year are most heartrending.
During the whole of one month, with occasional assistance of the father, they had pushed their van about Lincolnshire in the depths of dark, cold, cold winter. They had no horse, and they presented a too wretched spectacle for daylight travelling.
After their day’s work of popgun-firing and “rock”-selling at fairs, feasts, and races they put one or two of the little children who could not toddle alongside their van to _bed_—and bed it was—and commenced crying, pulling and hauling their van up hill and down dale till they got stuck fast at one of the Lincolnshire towns. By begging, cadging, and starvation the woman managed to scrape two pounds and some three or four shillings together, and off she started by rail from Heckington to Spilsby fair to buy a horse. She had left the children without a morsel of anything to eat. Every penny had been screwed and scraped together to make up the two pounds. She wandered about the fair all day, but could not succeed in buying a horse for two pounds. The horses were being gradually driven off the ground, the poor woman had had only a dry crust to eat, sat down and began to cry; in fact, while she was telling me her sorrowful tale of hardship and suffering, tears rolled freely down her face, and she kept breaking out in sobs and “The Lord love you” many and very many times over, with such an effect upon my poor self that I had but little rest that night. I was quite unnerved, and emptied my pockets of what little money I had among the poor little _posh_ gipsy children. While the woman was sitting in her sorrowful fix a man came up to her and asked her what was the matter with her. The poor creature unbosomed herself, and told him. They both there and then began to hunt up the old horses left in the fair; finally they met with one for two pounds—the grey old pony they had with them standing by the side of the cart when I saw them—and an animal it was, such as one does not see every day for bruises, humps, and hunches.