than the wretched
little rag and stick hovels, scarcely large enough to hold a
costermonger's wheelbarrow, in which the poor Gipsy women and children
are born, pig, and die--aye, and men too, if they can be called Gipsies,
with three-fourths, excepting the faintest cheering tint, of the blood of
English scamps and vagabonds in their reins, and the remainder consisting
of the blood of the vilest rascals from India and other nations. A real
Gipsy of the old type, of which there are but few, will tell you a lie
and look straight at you with a chuckle and grin; the so-called Gipsy now
will tell you a lie and look a thousand other ways while doing so. In
their own interest, and without mincing matters, it is time the plain
facts of their dark lives were brought to daylight, so that the
brightening and elevating effects of public opinion, law, and the Bible
may have their influence upon the character of the little ones about to
become in our midst the men and women of the future. Outside their
hovels or sack huts, poetically called 'tents' and 'encampments,' but in
reality schools for teaching their children how to gild double-dyed
lies,--sugar-coat deception, gloss idleness and filth, paint immorality
with Asiatic ideas, notions, and hues, and put a pleasant and cheerful
aspect upon taking things that do not belong to them, may be seen
thousands of ragged, half-naked, dirty, ignorant and wretched Gipsy
children, and the men loitering about mostly in idleness. Inside their
sack hovels are to be found man, wife, and six or seven children of all
ages, not one of them able to read or write, squatting or sleeping upon a
bed of straw, which through the wet and damp is often little better than
a manure-heap, in fact sometimes completely rotten, and as a Gipsy woman
told me last week, 'it is not fit to be handled with the hands.' In
noticing that many of the Gipsy children have a kind of eye-disease, I am
told by the women that it is owing to the sulphur arising from the coke
fire they have upon the ground in their midst, and which at times also
causes the children to turn pale and sickly. The sulphur affects the men
and women in various ways, sometimes causing a kind of stupor to come
over them. I have noticed farther that many of the adults are much
pitted with small-pox. It is a wonder to me that there is not more
disease among them than there appears to be, considering that they are
huddled together, regardless of sex or