ndell's kept among them, whenever it
was possible. On one occasion some farmers complained to the head-master
of the damage that had been done in hunting a deer over standing corn,
and the boy, to escape punishment, ran away from school and joined some
gipsies. Carew took very kindly to the life, but repeated accounts of
his parents' unhappiness brought him home after a year and a half's
wanderings. Though overwhelmed with 'marks of festive joy,' the call 'of
the wind on the heath,' was too strong to be resisted, and in a short
time he slipped away again and went back to his chosen people. He must
have been a very finished actor, with a genius for 'make-up,' to have
imposed on half the people that he befooled. Amongst his first roles
were those of a shipwrecked mariner; a poor Mad Tom, trying to eat live
coals; and a Kentish farmer, whose drowned farm in the Isle of Sheppey
could no longer support his wife and 'seven helpless infants.' Carew's
restless disposition took him to Newfoundland, and on his return he
successfully played the parts of a nonjuring clergyman, dispossessed of
his living for conscience' sake; a Quaker--here is a good example of his
wonderful gift--in an assembly of Quakers; a ruined miller; a
rat-catcher; and, having borrowed three children from a tinker, a
_grandmother_. Carew once wheedled a gentleman, who boasted that he
could not be taken in by beggars, into giving him liberal alms twice in
one day--in the morning as an unfortunate blacksmith, whose all had been
destroyed by fire; whilst in the afternoon, on crutches, his face 'pale
and sickly, his gestures very expressive of pain,' he pleaded as a
disabled tinner, who, from 'the damps and hardships he had suffered in
the mines,' could not work to keep his family.

At the death of Clause Patch, the King of the Gipsies, Carew was elected
King in his stead. Before he died, the aged King, feeling his end
approaching, bestowed a few last words of advice on his followers, well
worth quoting.

Of begging in the street and interrupting people who are talking, he
said: 'If they are tradesmen, their conversation will soon end, and may
be well paid for by a halfpenny; if an inferior clings to the skirt of a
superior, he will give twopence rather than be pulled off; and when you
are happy enough to meet a lover and his mistress, never part with them
under sixpence, for you may be sure they will never part from one
another.'

This is followed by shrewd a