I had expected to find a large opposition force confronting me, consisting of those who would keep the canal and gipsy children in their present degraded condition; but, like the Midianitish host, the breaking of my cracked pitcher had frightened them out of their wits, and they had scampered off to the hedges and ditches to skulk in front of me again another day. No doubt with my papers, Gladstone bag, spectacles, &c., I presented very much the appearance of “Mrs. Gamp” at her speechifying table.
These are my papers with all their faults and living seeds, sown and planted at the Master’s bidding, in the midst of much toil, hardship, and persecution; which seeds will bring forth a little eternal fruit some day—maybe, when my work is done, and I have been called home to rest with the little ones.
_The Condition of our Gipsies and their Children_, _with Remedies_.
In the year 1514 the gipsies landed in Scotland from the Continent, and from that date to the present time we have had in our midst over 30,000 men, women, and children with increasing numbers, going to and from our villages, towns, lanes, and fairs, and mixing with the simple, wise, gay, and foolish, leading the lives of vagabonds, demoralizing all they have been brought in contact with, by their lying, plundering, dirty, filthy, cheating, and crafty habits. In one word, the gipsies have been, and still are, a disgrace to Christian civilization. Of course there are exceptions among them, and I wish from the bottom of my heart that there were more.
They live huddled together regardless of either sex, age, or decency, under hedges, in tents, barns, or on the roadside, with but little regard for marriage ceremonies.
Their food, in many instances, is little better than garbage and refuse, and the most riff-raff of them bed themselves upon rotten straw.
We have also, at this late day, with sunny education gleaming on every hand, over 30,000 poor gipsy children of school age growing up as vagabonds, and not two per cent. of the whole able to read or write a sentence.
If our present-day gipsies had been of the romantic type of some two or three centuries ago, as pictured to us so beautifully by fascinating novelists, we might have wandered down the country green lanes, and by the side of rivulets, to admire their witchery, colours, and gipsy traits, exhibited with much refined skill, artistic touch, and feeling by gipsy writers; but the fact is, to state it plainly, the romantic gipsy of novels and romance has been dead long ago, and neither the stage, romance, nor imagination will ever bring him to life again in this country.