“I have not been content to sit upon mossy banks by the side of rippling rivulets, with a lovely sun shining overhead, and beneath the witching looks and mesmeric smiles of lovely damsels, swallowing love and other tales as gospel.
“It is time the hard facts and lot of our gipsies and their children—_i.e._, those travelling in vans, shows, and tents—were realized. It is time we asked ourselves the question, ‘What are the vast increasing numbers—over 30,000—of children tramping the country being trained for?’
“The fact is this: Parliament, Christians, moralists, and philanthropists have been content for generations to look at the gipsies and other travellers of the class through glasses tinted and prismed with the seven colours of the rainbow, handed to us by those who would keep the children in ignorance and sin, instead of taking them by the hand to help them out of their degrading position. My plan would improve their condition, without interfering with their liberty to any amount worth naming, considering the blessed advantages to be derived by the gipsies and others from it.
“No amount of misleading sentiment will stop me till the case of the poor children is remedied by the civilizing measures of the country—viz., education, sanitation, and moral precepts—extended to them by an Act of Parliament, as I have described in other places, which could be carried out, and a system of free education established, by means of a pass book, without any inconvenience or cost worth mention. Why should our present-day canal and gipsy children be left out in the cold?”
“’Tis not the work of force, but skill, To find the way into man’s will: ’Tis love alone can hearts unlock; Who knows the Word he needs not knock.”
Rambles Among the Gipsies at Daventry and Banbury Fairs.
THE eleventh of October, one thousand eight hundred and eighty-two dawned upon “Old England” while rain was coming down too drearily, drizzly, and freely for either man or beast to be comfortable. Foggy, cold, and murky November seemed desirous of making its advent earlier than usual. Not a songster was to be seen nor an autumnal chirp heard round our dwelling. Long dark nights had begun to creep over nature. “The last rose of summer,” the Queen of English flowers, was drooping its head and withering up, and the leaves were dwindling down to nothingness. The lanes were strewn with dying leaves which had done their duty nobly and well.