great extent, their present and eternal salvation. A tremendous
responsibility and sin hangs, and will hang, about the necks of those who
have in the past, or will in the future, shut the door of the school in
the face of the poor Gipsy child, and turn it into the streets to perish
everlastingly. I am confident the Gipsies will do their part if a simple
plan for its accomplishment can be set in motion. Harshness, cruelty,
and insult, rigid, and extreme measures will do no good with the Gipsies.
Fiery persecution will only frustrate my object. God knows, they are bad
enough, and I have no wish to mince matters, or to paint them white, as
fiction has done. I have tried--how far I have succeeded it is not for
me to say--to expose the evils, and not individuals, thoroughly, in
accordance with my duty to my God, my country, and my conscience, without
partiality, bias, or fear, be the consequences what they may. To write a
book full of glowing colour, pictures, fancies, imagination, and fiction,
is both more profitable and pleasant. The waft of a scented
pocket-handkerchief across one's face by the hand of a fair and lovely
damsel is only as a fleeting shadow and a passing vapour; they quickly
come and they quickly go, leaving no footstep behind them; a shooting
star and a flitting comet, and all is in darkness blacker than ever.
Somehow or other the Gipsies will, if possible, encamp near a school, but
they lack the power to enter, and some of them, no doubt, could send
their children to school for a few days occasionally; but the Gipsies
have got it in their heads that their children are not wanted, and this
is the case with the show people's children. Last autumn I saw myself an
encampment of Gipsies upon Turnham Green; there were about thirty Gipsy
children playing upon the school-fence, not one of whom could either read
or write. The school was only half full, and the teacher was looking
very pleasantly out of the door of the school upon the poor, ignorant
children as they were rolling about in the mud. In another part of
London a Gipsy owns some cottages, with some spare land between each
cottage; upon this land there is her own van and a number of other vans
and tents, for which standing ground they pay the Gipsy woman a rent of
one shilling and sixpence per week each. Neither herself nor any of the
Gipsies connected with the encampment could tell a letter, and there were
some sixty to seventy men, women, and c