Flash and his wife were just having a ham tea, and they invited me to join them, which of course I did, and rubbed my hands quickly with delight. It was a prime cut, the frizzling and frying of which brought water to my teeth and a smacking of my lips. I was served with tea out of one of their best old china cups, which was a treat every one had not the pleasure of enjoying. After my gipsy rambles I thoroughly enjoyed the late tea. They showed me their beautiful feather bed at the end of the van, and unbosomed some of their successes and some of their trials and hardships. I gave them a few pictures, which they said they should have framed. They then filled my bag with “prize onions,” and I shook hands with them, to meet again some day, perhaps at Bagworth or Barleston, in Leicestershire, where Flash first saw daylight.
Not one of this batch of _posh_ gipsy travellers raised a murmur against my plan for bringing about a free education for the gipsy and other travelling children, and the registration of their vans.
Just under the glittering crown and “coronation pole” stood what, so far as the underworks indicated, had been once an old fish cart, over the top of which had been placed some half-barrel hoops, covered with old tarpauling sheets. The outside woodwork consisted of pieces of orange boxes, packing cases, &c., and was daubed over with paint little better than a child would daub a pigstye door. The dirty patches and blotches of glaring colours were laid on in an infinitely more zigzag fashion than the trailmarks of snails and worms. The creaking _door_ was hung with pieces of leather; in fact, the whole outside, together with the pieces of old leather straps, and string-tied-together harness, old rags, buckets, and boxes underneath, presented a sight that I shall never forget. All this family of Y—ks wanted to make them perfect gipsies was that they should pick up some gipsy slang, Romany, learn how to eat hedgehogs, snails, and diseased pork, tell lies, gabble out fortunes, poison fowls, choke pigs, throttle sheep, take all, by hook or by crook, they could lay their hands upon, wash their faces in walnut water, roll about in mud and filth, smoke and eat “black jack,” and adopt the gipsy names of Smith, Lee, Boswell, Hearn, Lovell, Fletcher, Simpson, Draper. With these gipsy traits brought out they would be enabled to live a roving, lively, idle time of it to their hearts’ content. So say some gipsy writers. What a contrast, I thought, as I saw some young ladies standing at the window of a large house looking upon the scene only a few yards away. There a piano, played by gentle, nimble fingers, was sending forth sweet notes of heavenly, charming music sometimes at a galloping pace, and at other times as the gentle murmuring of clear rippling waters over bright and glossy pebbles, echoing love upon earth and peace and goodwill in the air, turning the widow’s sorrowful tears, the business parent’s troubles and care drops, into silver stepping-stones leading onward and upward to heaven. For the life of me I could not help showing my weakness by lifting up my eyelids to make room for the scalding tears that wanted to force their way down my cheeks. The wide chasm there is between human happiness and heaven and human woe and hell is something horrifying and horrible. Would to God that our sensual, sensational, and degrading backwood gipsy writers could be brought to see the mischief they are doing by dragging the poor lost gipsies and other travellers down to utter ruin, body and soul, for all time and throughout eternity, by their damning, poisonous writings.