rown-up youths and big girls
running about entirely nude in the morning, and squatting about the
ground and leaving their filth behind them more like animals than human
beings endowed with souls and reason. When I was there it was with some
difficulty I could put my foot in a clean place. The same kind of thing
occurs in a more or less degree wherever Gipsies are located, and, sad to
relate, house-dwelling Gipsies are very little better in this respect.
Grellmann, speaking of the German and Hungarian Gipsies many years ago,
says:--"We may easily account for the colour of their skin. The
Laplanders, Samoyeds, as well as the Siberians, have bronze,
yellow-coloured skins, in consequence of living from their childhood in
smoke and dirt, as the Gipsies do. These would long ago have got rid of
their swarthy complexions if they had discontinued this Gipsy manner of
living. Observe only a Gipsy from his birth till he comes to man's
estate, and one must be convinced that their colour is not so much owing
to their descent as to the nastiness of their bodies. In summer the
child is exposed to the scorching sun, in winter it is shut up in a smoky
hut. Some mothers smear their children over with black ointment, and
leave them to fry in the sun or near the fire. They seldom trouble
themselves about washing or other modes of cleaning themselves.
Experience also shows us that it is more their manner of life than
descent which has propagated this black colour of the Gipsies from
generation to generation." I am told, and I verily believe it, that many
of the children are not washed for years together. I have seen over and
over again dirt peeling off the poor children's bodies and faces like a
skin, and leaving a kind of white patch behind it, presenting a kind of a
piebald spectacle. Some of the children never take their clothes off
till they drop off in shreds. Many of the Gipsies, both old and young,
have only one suit of clothes. English delicacy of feeling and sentiment
for female virtue must stand abashed with horror at this kind of
civilisation in the nineteenth century of Christian England. I have seen
washing done on the Sunday afternoon among them, and while the clothes
have been drying on the line the women and children have been roasting
themselves before the fires in nearly a nude state. A Sunday or two ago
a poor Gipsy woman was washing her only smoky-looking blanket late in the
afternoon, and upon which she wou