rickety old chairs, and a three-legged table that had to be propped
against the wall, and a rusty old poker, with a smoking fire-place. The
Gipsy father was a strong man, not over fond of work; he had been in
prison once; the mother, a strong Gipsy woman of the old type, marked
with small-pox, and plenty of tongue--by the way, I may say I have not
yet seen a dumb and deaf Gipsy. She turned up her dress sleeves and
showed me how she had "made the blood run out of another Gipsy woman for
hitting her child." As she came near to me exhibiting her fisticuffing
powers, I might have been a little nervous years ago; but dealing with
men and things in a rough kind of fashion for so many years has taken
some amount of nervousness of this kind out of me.

It may be as well to remark here that the Gipsy women can do their share
of fighting, and are as equally pleased to have a stand-up fight as the
Gipsy men are. One of these Gipsy women lives with a man who is not a
thorough Gipsy, who spends a deal of his time under lock and key on
account of his poaching inclinations; and other members of this large
family are on the same kind of sliding scale, and not one of whom can
read or write.

It is not pleasant to say strong things about clergymen, for whom I have
the highest respect; nevertheless, there are times when respect for
Christ's church, duty to country, love for the children and anxiety for
their eternal welfare, compels you to step out of the beaten rut to
expose, though with pain, wrong-doing. In a day and Sunday school-yard
connected with the Church of England, not one hundred miles from London,
there are to be seen--and I am informed by them, except during the
hop-picking season, that it is their camping-ground, and has been for
years--one van, in which there are man, wife, young woman, and a daughter
of about fourteen years of age; the young woman and daughter sleep in a
kind of box under the man and his wife. In another part of the yard is a
Gipsy tent, where God's broad earth answers the purpose of a table, and a
"batten of straw" serves as a bed. There is a woman, two daughters, one
of whom is of marriageable age and the other far in her teens, and a
youth I should think about sixteen years of age. I should judge that the
mother and her two daughters sleep on one bed at one end of the tent and
the youth at the other; there is no partition between them, and only
about seven feet of space between each bed of litt