[Picture: A scissor-grinding gipsy. “Scissors to grind”]
Another gang had been out on a poaching expedition with their lurcher dogs, and brought to their tents and vans some hares, rabbits, and pheasants; these were also divided. Among this vast gipsy encampment, numbering some hundred men, women, and children, I saw an aged couple of gipsies with some of their grandchildren round them. The old woman had learned to read the Bible a little, and she was telling the children to be good and love God. She was the only one who could read among the gipsies, except a few riffraff Gorgios, who were studying gipsying with a view to leading an idle vagabond’s life, free from parental restraint and elevating social influences.
In the camp I noticed a _posh_ gipsy “scissor-grinder” from one of our alleys, and his gipsy wife; every few minutes he bawled out, “Scissors to grind!” “Scissors to grind!” While he was grinding away at his knives and scissors, his wife was stitching umbrellas and “minding her baby.”
I found that the man had had a good education at a high-class school, but had taken the “wrong turning,” and now spent part of his time in “scissor-grinding,” singing gipsy “slap-dash songs,” and during the short days of winter “dotted down” gipsy love tales, &c. He had smudged thickly over the soul saving golden letters embedded in his memory in the days of childhood—as all young men and maidens do who take to gipsying—the fifth commandment: “_Honour thy father and thy mother_; _that thy days may be long upon the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee_.” Poor follow! I felt sorry to see his dirty knees through the rents in his breeches. In his childhood he had been taught by his Christian parents to lisp as he knelt with his head bent low against his mother’s knees—
“Teach me to live that I may dread The grave as little as my bed.”
“I lay my body down to sleep, Let angels guard my bed.”
Now he could sing out with his wife’s assistance—more jovially, of course, than Hubert Smith sung it on his tramp to Norway—
“My father’s the king of the gipsies—that’s true, My mother, she learned me some camping to do. With a packet on my back, and they all wish me well, I started up to London, some fortunes for to tell.”