I have heard the Forester criticized as "independent". Why should he not be? He works when he needs, often for himself, and there is a dignity about him, and a determination to stand upon his ancient rights; he would rather give than take, and he would be affronted if you offered payment for his little gifts of sloes, of honey, or of "musharoons". The special forest industries are disappearing; the last charcoal burner's hut is really only preserved as a curiosity. You rarely see the gipsies platting mats or baskets, though there is an old man who still goes round, and sits by the roadside, reseating your old chairs with cane or rushes.
One of the favourite camping grounds of the gipsies is a crest of moor, fringed with Scotch firs, called Coldharbour, a name accounted for by some as _Col d'arbres_, "the ridge or neck of trees". It may well be, for the pines are a striking feature, very old and in their grouping very lovely, shorn by the prevailing winds into harmonious curves, bending away from the sea; for over Setley Plain the sea winds sweep, and often the sea mists too. Lifting my eyes from my writing, I can see as many as three caravans drawn up in the shade, for it is fair-time, and the spot, but just aside from the high road, affords a night's shelter to these nomads who travel from fair to fair, pasture too for their horses, and water from a pond formed at the bottom of an old gravel pit just below.
It is generally the vanners who come to this spot, vagrants rather than true gipsies ("Diddyki", the Romany calls them), and untidy in their leavings, which the genuine gipsy seldom is. These prefer to set up their snug little tents in the thicket of the Brake just across the plain. Here I have found a young mother with an infant of days in a tent on hoops, not much larger than a gig-umbrella, a fire hard by in a bell tent with a hole at the top. Going to pay a call with a pink flannel to wrap the baby in, I found mother and child warm, happy, and content, the former rejoicing in the permission accorded, under these circumstances, of a stay of two weeks. Once I ventured to condole with a gipsy woman on wild wintry weather in such a tent. She tossed back her jet-black plaits: "Oh, I likes it, my dear; I'm used to it, ye see".