No wonder at stable-boys and quacks, the sons of ministers, and others, becoming bewitched to the extent of having to face the frowns of friends on account of their gipsy-poaching proclivities.
My process may have been sharp and painful, and probably it is so now, but it will be found effective, enduring, and pleasing in the end. To deal with the evils of gipsying in a manner to excite the worst side of human nature may be pleasing for the present, but it will bring remorse and rottenness which no amount of misleading romance and pleasingly painted sin will be able to cover.
During the day I was informed by the gipsies that one young farmer had spent fifteen shillings in bowling for cocoa-nuts, and a youth not more than fourteen years old had spent five shillings similarly; this being so, it is not to be wondered at that our present-day gipsies should be on the increase at the rate they are. With fair weather, nuts cheap, cricketers out of the way, and “plenty of young uns,” it is a “roaring trade.”
When questioning one gipsy woman as to how many of the gipsies upon the ground could read and write—I roughly calculated the number of gipsies to be over a hundred men and women, and a hundred and fifty children—she answered me as follows: “Lord bless you, my dear good gentleman, I do not know more than three upon the green who can read and write. It would be a blessed thing if they could; but that will never be, as nobody takes any interest in us gipsies.”
It was tearfully sorrowful to see over a hundred and fifty children squatting about in bogs, dirt, filth, excitement, iniquity, and double-dyeing sin, groping their way to wretchedness and misery, without any hand being put out to save them.
So far as I could gather, not half a dozen of these gangs of un-English, lawless tramps and travellers had ever been in either day or Sunday school. And our civilizing “State” has not taken any steps for bringing the gipsy and other travelling children under school influence.
“Now, my lads, bowl away! All bad nuts returned; bowl away! Try your luck now, my young gentlemen; try your luck; bowl away!” Bang went a cocoa-nut off one of the stilts, flying in all directions, with the oil scattered to the winds. One thing has often surprised me, that the gipsies have not had frequently to carry cracked skulls, for some of the roguish “farmer chaps” seem to delight more in bowling at the gipsies’ heads than the cocoa-nuts at their feet. It is their quick-sightedness and dexterous movements that save them. No drone would do to be at the back of the “pegs,” or he would have to look out for his “pins.”