I retired from the hubbub for a few minutes, to stand against one of the huge trees growing upon the edge of the “green,” and while there I heard some gipsies chuckling over the “gingered” and “screwed” horses and ponies they had sold during the fair, and arranging which of their party should hunt the customer out the next day, to buy back for a five-pound note their palmed-off “broken-winded” and “roaring old screws” which they had sold for seventeen pound or twenty pound during the fair. A fine-looking broken-winded horse, “roarer” or “cribber,” with the mark intact, is almost a fortune for a gipsy. During two or three years “while he will go,” the “screw” is sold and bought in again scores of times. Many of the horse-dealing gipsies are dressed nowadays as farmers, and by these means they more readily palm off their “screws” upon young beginning town or street hawkers, carriers, and higglers.
Living in some of the vans of gipsies there were man, woman, and, in some instances, seven or eight sons and daughters of all ages. In other vans and tents there was a mixture of men, women, and children, not of the same blood relationship; and the same may be said of some of the travelling gingerbread hawkers.
Those of the hawkers who were rich enough to own a van slept in it “higgledy-piggledy,” “pell-mell,” and “all of a heap.” Those who had not vans, the men, women, and “chaps” slept upon the ground, under the stall boards, in a manner which would be a disgrace to South African civilization and Zulu morals.
In the midst of waning twilight and the gathering of sheets and rents, some of the gipsy women were preparing for their last meal before shutting the van doors and drawing to their tent curtains. Scores of poor little lost, dirty, ignorant, neglected, and almost naked, gipsy children gathered round me for “coppers” and “sweets.” After digging deep into my pocket for all I could find, and distributing them among the children, I bade the gipsy parents “good-night” and a “good-bye,” and then turned to have a chat and a “good-night” with George Bagworth, the steam-horse driver, and his wife, the “popgun” firer. George was dressed in his best large Scotch plaid suit from head to foot. His “hurdy-gurdy steam organ,” and “flying horses,” had winged married and single, men, women, and children, round and round, exhibiting their thick and thin legs, not modestly for the riders, but successfully for George and his sharp, good-looking, business wife. George was in good humour with himself and everybody else. He entered freely into conversation about his troubles and trials in former years, and of his successes, position, and future views.