Transcribed from the J. B. Lippincott edition by David Price, email
ccx074@pglaf.org
[Picture: The Rev. George Hall. Photo: Brigham]
THE
GYPSY’S PARSON
HIS EXPERIENCES AND ADVENTURES
* * * * *
BY
THE REV. GEORGE HALL
RECTOR OF RUCKLAND, LINCOLNSHIRE
* * * * *
_ILLUSTRATED_
* * * * *
PHILADELPHIA
J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY
LONDON: SAMPSON LOW, MARSTON & CO. LTD.
* * * * *
TO
MY WIFE
MY COMPANION
ON MANY A GYPSY-JAUNT
* * * * *
“_They cast the glamour o’er him_.”
* * * * *
“YOU must forgive us. We are barbarians. . . . We are ruffians of
the sun . . . and we must be forgiven everything.”
“It is easy to forgive in the sun,” Domini said.
“Madame, it is impossible to be anything but lenient in the sun.
That is my experience. . . . But, as I was saying, the sun teaches
one a lesson of charity. When I first came to live in Africa in the
midst of the sand-rascals—eh, Madame, I suppose as a priest I ought
to have been shocked by their goings-on. And, indeed I tried to be,
I conscientiously did my best, but it was no good. I couldn’t be
shocked. The sunshine drove it all out of me. I could only say, ‘It
is not for me to question le bon Dieu, and le bon Dieu has created
these people and set them here in the sand to behave as they do.
What is my business? I can’t convert them. I can’t change their
morals—I must just be a friend to them, cheer them up in their
sorrows, give them a bit if they’re starving, doctor them a
little—I’m a first-rate hand at making an Arab take a pill or a
powder—when they are ill, and I make them at home with the white
marabout.’ That’s what the sun has taught me, and every sand-rascal
and sand-rascal’s child in Amara is a friend of mine.”
“You are fond of the Arabs, then?” she said.
“Of course I am, Madame. I can speak their language, and I’m as much
at home in their tents, and more, than I ever should be at the
Vatican—with all respect to the Holy Father.”
(Conversation between Domini and Father Beret in _The Garden of Allah_,
quoted here by the kind permission of Mr. Robert Hichens.)
PREFACE
NOT a few writers have essayed to study the Gypsies in dusty libraries.
I have companioned with them on fell and common, racecourse and
fairground, on the turfy wayside and in the city’s heart. In my book,
which is a record of actual experiences, I have tried to present the
Gypsies just as I have found them, without minimising their faults or
magnifying their virtues. Most of the Gypsies mentioned in the following
pages have now passed away, and of those who remain, many have, for
obvious reasons, been renamed.
For the majority of the pictures adorning my book, I owe a profound debt
of gratitude to my friend, Mr. Fred Shaw; also, for their kind permission
to include several pictures in my “Romany Gallery,” my cordial thanks are
due to Mrs. Johnson, of Yatton, Rev. H. H. Malleson, Mr. William
Ferguson, Mr. T. J. Lewis, Mr. H. Stimpson, and Mr. F. Wilkinson.
The phonetics contained in this work are based upon a system invented by
my friend, Mr. R. A. Scott Macfie, of the Gypsy Lore Society, whose
innumerable kindnesses I most gratefully acknowledge.
G. H.
RUCKLAND RECTORY,
NEAR LOUTH,
LINCOLNSHIRE.
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
I. GYPSY COURT—MY INITIATION INTO GYPSYDOM 1
II. CHARACTERS OF THE COURT—READING BORROW 16
III. NORTH-COUNTRY GYPSIES 32
IV. MY POACHING PUSSY—A ROMANY BENISON—MY FIRST TASTE 41
OF HEDGEHOG
V. A GYPSY BAPTISM—ROMANY NAMES 52
VI. I MAKE A NEW ACQUAINTANCE 57
VII. THE BLACKPOOL GYPSYRY 71
VIII. A TRENTSIDE FAIR 89
IX. TAKEN FOR TRAMPS—AN EAST ANGLIAN FAMILY 99
X. PETERBOROUGH FAIR 118
XI. A FORGOTTEN HIGHWAY—“ON THE ROAD” WITH 134
JONATHAN—THE PATRIN—THE GHOST OF THE HAYSTACK
XII. THE GYPSY OF THE TOWN 152
XIII. WITH THE YORKSHIRE GYPSIES 172
XIV. A NIGHT WITH THE GYPSIES—THE SWEEP OF LYNN—LONDON 186
GYPSIES—ON EPSOM DOWNS
XV. TINKERS AND GRINDERS 205
XVI. THE INN ON THE RIDGEWAY—TALES BY THE FIRESIDE 213
XVII. HORNCASTLE FAIR 229
XVIII. A GYPSY SEPULCHRE—BURIAL LORE—THE PASSING OF 238
JONATHAN
XIX. _BITSHADO PAWDEL_ (TRANSPORTED) 247
XX. A ROMANY MUNCHAUSEN 256
XXI. THE GYPSY OF THE HILLS—IN THE HEART OF WALES—A 262
WESTMORLAND HORSE FAIR
XXII. FURZEMOOR 278
GLOSSARY OF ROMANY WORDS 291
GYPSY FORE OR CHRISTIAN NAMES 299
INDEX 303
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
THE GYPSY’S PARSON _Frontispiece_
FACING PAGE
A ROMANY LASS 6
THE CAMP IN THE LANE 20
A DAUGHTER OF “JASPER PETULENGRO” 28
ON THE MOORLAND 36
A NORTH-COUNTRY GYPSY GIRL 36
ROUND THE CAMP-FIRE 48
A CHILD OF THE CARAVAN 48
A REST BY THE WAY 62
A WAYSIDE IDYL 68
CHILDREN OF THE OPEN AIR 68
ON THE LOOK-OUT 72
THE GYPSY’S PARSON WITH HIS FRIENDS 86
FRIENDS AT THE FAIR 86
A MAID OF THE TENTS 112
ON THE EVE OF THE FAIR 118
MIDLAND GYPSIES 128
SOUTH-COUNTRY GYPSIES 128
NETTING RABBITS 139
’NEATH THE HEDGEROW 139
THE GYPSY’S PARSON ON THE ROAD 142
GYPSIES AT HOME 146
COMRADES 146
“A MOTHER IN EGYPT” 160
HOUSE-DWELLING GYPSIES 172
A GYPSY LAD 184
ON THE RACECOURSE 202
A TINKER OF THE OLDEN TIMES 208
A WELSH GYPSY TINKER 208
A ROMANY FIDDLER 222
HORNCASTLE HORSE FAIR 230
READY FOR THE FAIR 232
YARD OF THE “GEORGE” INN, HORNCASTLE 232
A LONDON GYPSY 246
“BLACK AS A BOZ’LL” 258
OLI PURUM 264
A GYPSY HARPIST 264
A HAPPY PAIR 268
A CHAT BY THE GATE 268
’NEATH CAUTLEY CRAG 272
A BOTTOMLESS POOL 272
A WANDERING MINSTREL 274
BROUGH HILL HORSE FAIR 276
GYPSY CHILDREN 280
CHAPTER I
GYPSY COURT—MY INITIATION INTO GYPSYDOM
A TANGLE of sequestered streets lying around a triple-towered cathedral;
red roofs and gables massed under the ramparts of an ancient castle; a
grey Roman arch lit up every spring-time by the wallflower’s mimic gold;
an old-world Bailgate over whose tavern yards drifted the sleepy music of
the minster chimes; a crooked by-lane leading down to a wide common loved
by the winds of heaven—these were the surroundings of my childhood’s home
in that hilltop portion of Lincoln which has never quite thrown off its
medieval drowsiness.
Not far from my father’s doorstep, as you looked towards the common, lay
a narrow court lined with poor tenements, and terminating in a bare yard
bounded by a squat wall. Every detail of this alley stands out in my
memory with the sharpness of a photograph; the cramped perspective of the
place as you entered it from our lane, the dreary-looking houses with
their mud-floored living-rooms fronting upon the roadway, the paintless
doors and windows, the blackened chimneys showing rakish against the sky,
all combined to make a picture of dun-coloured misery. There were, it is
true, a few redeeming features gilding the prevailing drabness of the
scene. The entrance to the court had a southerly outlook upon green
fields stretching up to the verge of the Castle Dyking, or, to revive its
more gruesome name, “Hangman’s Ditch,” so called from the grim
associations of a bygone day. From these fields a clean air blew through
the court, rendering it a less unwholesome haunt for the strange folk who
dwelt within its precincts; while not half a mile distant lay the breezy
common, a glorious playground for the children of Upper Lincoln.
Seeing that this court and its denizens were destined in the order of
things to make a profound impression upon my childish imagination, I may
as well develop the picture rising so vividly before my mind’s eye.
It was somewhere in the fifties of the last century, a few years, that is
to say, before my entrance into the world, that several families of
dark-featured “travellers” had pitched upon the court for their Gypsyry,
a proceeding at which our quiet lane at first shrugged its shoulders,
then focussed an interested gaze upon the intruders and their ways, and
finally lapsed into an indulgent toleration of them. Thus from day to
day throughout my early years, there might have been seen emerging from
the recesses of Gypsy Court swarthy men in twos and threes accompanied by
the poacher’s useful lurcher; nut-brown girls with their black hair
carelessly caught up in orange or crimson kerchiefs; wrinkled crones
smoking short clays, as gaily they drove forth in their rickety
donkey-carts; buxom mothers carrying babies slung, Indian fashion, across
their shoulders, and bearing on their arms baskets replete with pegs,
skewers, and small tin-ware of home manufacture. As for children, troops
of the brown imps were generally in evidence, their eldritch shrieks
rending the air between the portals of the little court and the gate
opening upon the common.
No observes could possibly miss the fighting scenes and the ringing
shouts which made the court echo again. A passionate folk are the
Gypsies, a provoking word being at any time sufficient to call forth a
blow. Even as I write these words, visions of gory fists and faces
obtrude themselves through the mists of past days.
However, the Gypsies were never reported to be otherwise than polite
towards the outsider who ventured into the alley. Diplomats rather than
hooligans were they. “Let’s ’eave ’alf a brick at ’im,” is not the
Gypsy’s way with a stranger who happens to stroll into the camp. At the
same time I would not have it imagined that the inhabitants of the
squalid court were of the best black Romany breed; far from it, they were
mostly of diluted blood, else how came they to turn sedentary at all?
For pure Gypsies (or _Romanitshelaw_, as they call themselves), the
aristocrats of their race, abhor settled life, preferring to die on the
road rather than wither inside four walls.
On the occasion of a horse fair in the city, our lane would resound with
the clanging of hoofs beyond the ordinary, and in front of the taverns
there was much rattling of whipstocks on the insides of hard hats, in
order to enliven some weedy “screw,” and so reward its owner for hours of
patient “doctoring” in a corner well screened from prying eyes. Then
when the autumnal rains set in, and the leaves began to flutter down in
showers, there would come from afar the rumbling of Romany “homes on
wheels,” driven townwards by the oncoming of winter. To me it was always
a saddening sight to watch the travel-stained wanderers hying to their
winter quarters through miry streets heavy with mist and gloom.
_Staruben sî gav_ (town is a prison), an ancient vagabond was heard to
remark on a like occasion.
A spectacle far more inspiriting was the departure of a Gypsy cavalcade
from the city on a gay spring morning. For into the dingy purlieus where
the travellers had wintered more or less cheerlessly, stray sunbeams and
soft airs had begun to penetrate. Tidings had reached them that away in
the open something had stirred, or called, or breathed along the furzy
lanes and among the tree boughs, and forthwith every Romany sojourner
within the ash-strewn yards of the city became eager to resume the free,
roving life of the roads. How often have I longed for the brush of an
artist to depict the company of merry Gypsies—men, women, and bairns,
horses, dogs, and donkeys, jingling pot-carts and living-wagons bedizened
with new paint, starting from the top of our lane for the open country,
just when the wind-rocked woods were burgeoning and every green
hedge-bottom had a sprinkling of purple violets.
Now until my eleventh year I had seen no more than the mere outside of
Romany life, and I might never have had any Gypsy experiences to relate
but for a trivial blood-spilling, which, as I look back upon it, may well
be called my initiation into Gypsydom. Indeed, the small incident I am
about to mention had for me a most important result, insomuch as it made
me akin to Gypsies for the rest of my life.
My earliest schools were dames’ academies—there were two of these
old-time institutions in our lane. Approached by a dark passage, the
second of these had for its lecture-hall a large brick-floored room,
whose presiding spirit was a dwarfish lady of sixty-five or more, before
whom we sat in rows at long desks. The school consisted of about a score
of children who were awed into subjection by a threatening rod of supple
ash, half as long again as the tapering stick around which the
scarlet-runners in your kitchen garden love to entwine themselves. This
dread implement of discipline, reared in a recess near our mistress’s
desk, would oft descend upon the head of a chattering boy or girl, and to
the tip of that rod my own pate was no stranger.
[Picture: A Romany Lass. Photo: Valentine & Sons]
Among my acquaintances at this school was a Gypsy girl whose parents
dwelt at the sunny end of the aforementioned court. A year or two my
senior, Sibby Smith was a shapely lass, having soft hazel eyes and a
wealth of dark hair crowning an olive-tinted face. Lissom as whalebone,
she had a pretty way of capering along the lanes with hedgerow berries or
leaves of autumn’s painting in her hair, and I, a silent, retiring boy,
would watch her movements with admiring eyes. Fittingly upon that lithe
form sat a garb of tawny-brown, with here a wisp of red and there a tag
of yellow, mingled as on the wings of a butterfly. The girl had a
harum-scarum brother, Snakey by name and slippery by nature, a little
older than herself, with whom out of school hours she would be off and
away searching the bushes for birds’ nests, or ransacking the thickets
for nuts; and one day in school I remember how she pulled out
inadvertently with her handkerchief a catapult—a Gypsy can bring down a
pheasant with the like—and falling with a clatter at our teacher’s feet,
the unholy weapon was straightway confiscated, whereat Sibby’s face grew
darker by a shade, as with her pen-nib she savagely stabbed the desk on
which our copybooks were outspread. A roamer in all the copses and lanes
around our city, and enjoying the freedom of the camps which tarried for
little or for long in the old brickyards fringing the common, this
schoolmate of mine expressed the out-of-door spirit in her very gait, and
as she pirouetted along the causeway, you caught from her flying figure
the smell of wood smoke and the mossy odour of deep dingles.
In all the world it is hard to find the elusive Gypsy’s compeer.
Whimsical as the wind, and brimful of mischief as an elf of the wilds,
Sibby was to me the embodiment of bewitching mystery. From a hillock by
the hedge I have watched her seize a skittish pony by the mane and,
leaping astride its back, gallop madly along a lane, to return a few
moments later, breathless and dishevelled. This was her frolicsome mood.
Never very far below the surface of the Gypsy nature lurks a feeling of
disdain, waxing fierce at times towards everything and everybody outside
the Romany world. To this mood the Gypsy life appears to be the only
life worth living, and the Gypsy is the only real man in the world. All
other ways and all alien folk are suspect. There were times therefore
when Sibby’s eyes would pierce me through with arrows of detestation as
though one had hailed from beneath the eaves of a constabulary. Yet the
next day, every shred of this dark feeling would be flung to the winds,
as under a scented may-bush the girl was romancing merrily or instructing
me in the peculiar whistle giving warning of the approach of Velveteens
or a policeman.
Is there in the whole bag of humanity, I wonder, a nut harder to crack
than the Gypsy?
One afternoon in turning a corner sharply on my way home from school, it
happened that I ran full tilt into Sibby Smith, and before I could say
“Jack Robinson” I received such a blow on the mouth as sent me sprawling
all my length on the road. There was, I suppose, something ludicrous in
the sight of a prostrate boy with his legs in the air; so at least the
girl seemed to think, for immediately she burst into laughter, and her
merriment being ever of an infectious sort, I found myself laughing too,
though inwardly I thought my punishment unmerited. A moment later,
however, as I stood wiping the blood from my lips, the puzzle was
explained. There in the dust lay a half-eaten, red-cheeked apple which
the Gypsy had been munching when the shock of the collision sent it
flying from her hand; hence the blow that descended upon me so swiftly.
Nor after the lapse of nearly forty years have I forgotten the forceful
stroke that laid me low on that autumn afternoon.
On stormy days, when the loud-lunged gusts made a fanfaronade in the
chimney-stacks at home, it was my delight as a boy to seek the brow of
the grassy escarpment overlooking our common, and at that time I knew
nothing more glorious than a tussle with the wind roaring over the
hilltop. Leaping on the springy turf, hatless and bare-armed, fighting a
make-believe giant of sonorous voice, what high glee of spirit was mine!
In those days the escarpment boasted a row of windmills, old-fashioned
structures, built partly of timber and partly of brick and stone, and
loud was the whirring of sails thereabouts in a brisk wind. At the head
of a cleft in the hillside, known as “Hobbler’s Hole,” was a mill which
had fallen into desuetude, and its great sails, shattered by a tempest,
lay in tangled heaps on the thistle-grown plot around the building. To
the tall thistles, tufted with downy seed, came goldfinches, dainty
little fellows, shy as fairies. Hitherward came also visitors of another
kind, for, as might be expected, the unwritten invitation to such a
harvest of firewood had duly spread to Gypsy Court. More than once in
the twilight Sibby got me to help her in carrying off fragments of
timber, and to a boy with _Tiger Tom the Pirate_ secreted in the lining
of his jacket, these small adventures were not without a tang of the
picaresque. As time went on, the door in the basement of the mill and
most of the window-frames were dragged piecemeal from their places to
boil Gypsy kettles, but there still remained the massive ladder giving
access to the dusty chambers wherein nestled the strangest of shadows.
Every youngster who came to play in Hobbler’s Hole knew quite well that
the mill was haunted. Readily enough we climbed the worm-eaten ladder in
broad daylight, and scampered about the resounding floors, or sat at the
frameless windows pelting bits of plaster at the jackdaws flitting to and
fro, but to think of invading the mouldering mill in the dusk hour when
hollow and common were visioned away into shadowy night was another
matter. Ah, then the mill took on an eeriness befitting a very
borderland of goblindom.
Picturing the crumbling ruin and the wrinkled declivity dipping below it
towards the common, I recall how Snakey Smith said one day to me, “I
likes to sit afore a fire on the ground. You don’t feel nothing like so
lonesome as you keeps pushing sticks into the fire and watching ’em burn
away.” The words aptly express a Gypsy’s joy in a fire for its own sake,
regardless of utilitarian considerations. At the moment there may be no
kettle waiting to be boiled, no black stockpot demanding to be slung on
the crooked kettle-prop, yet, for the pure pleasure of the thing, a Gypsy
will light a small pile of dead sticks, and, lounging near, will gaze
wistfully at the spiral of thin, sweet smoke upcurling between the trees
in the lane.
Without a doubt, if “you’s been a bit onlucky,” or, if your sky is cloudy
with sorrow, there is solace in a fire, as in a folk-tale and in the
voice of a violin. Did not Provost M‘Cormick, lawyer and lover of
Gypsies, find his Border Tinklers, amid their brown tents and shaggy
“cuddies,” reciting traditional tales to banish gloom? “Whenever he saw
me dull he wad say, ‘Come on, Mary, and I’ll tell ye a fairy tale,’ and
wi’ his gestures, girns, and granes, he wadna be lang till he had us a’
roarin’.”
A Gypsy who resided in a derelict railway carriage on a Cheshire common,
having lost a dear child, refused to be comforted and even declined to
take food. To his old fiddle he confided his grief, his body swaying to
and fro as he drew forth plaintive airs from the strings.
Wandering one evening in cowslip-time below the decrepit windmill, I came
to a stile in the hedge, and, passing into the lane, I found Sibby and
Snakey heaping dead wood upon a fire on the margin of the common.
“There!” exclaimed the Gypsy girl, “I know’d somebody was a-thinking of
me, ’cos my boots kept coming unlaced.”
“Well, well, you made me jump, _baw_ (mate), you did,” put in her
brother. “How did you _jin_ we were _akai_?” (know we were here).
“See,” said I, “what a pother you are making. I caught a whiff of your
smoke right on top of the hill.”
With that I dropped down beside the fire, and, yielding the soul to the
witchery of red-gold flames dancing against the dark, it was easy enough
to glide into the realm of Faerie. Sibby, who had been lying at full
length before the fire, now gathered herself into a cross-legged posture,
and, lapsing into meditation, sat twisting a black elf-lock round her
forefinger. A touch of the “creepy” world seemed also to have fallen
upon Snakey, for he lay in silence staring into the beyond as though he
had sighted fairy faces peering between the brier sprays; or was it that
the knotted tree-bole leaning from the hedge had begun to make grimaces?
At last the boy awoke with a start. By his side lay a maiden ash-plant
with numerous hearts and rings neatly cut on its green bark, and,
whipping out a knife, he proceeded to add further touches to his _kosht_
(stick). This led me to talk of my own achievement of that day in
carving my initials on a beech tree not far from where we were sitting.
Whereat Sibby remarked—
“Why, it was only last week that me and mother went in our cart past
Dalton Brook, and we pulled up to look at the old tree what has _dui
vastaw_ (two hands) cut into it by Orferus Herren, and there they were
right enough. It was his brother Evergreen who broke his neck by
tumbling headlong into a stone-pit, wasn’t it, Snakey?”
“For sure it was, _pen_ (sister), and our uncles Fennix and Euri were
well-nigh killed the same way right up agen Scotland, as I’ve heard dad
say times and agen.”
“How was that?” I asked.
Then followed Snakey’s story, which, as well as I remember, ran (in his
own words) something like this—
“One night my uncles Fennix and Euri was crossing a moor among the
mountains, a long way up into the North Country. They’d been sitting all
the day in a _kitshima_ (tavern) and at last they begins to think it were
time to be marching to their stopping-place, some five miles away across
the moor, a wery nasty country with deep pits and ponds in it. It was
getting dark and the teeny stars were shining above the mountains. Well,
my uncles made off with a deal of bustle at first along a beaten track,
but after going a mile or two, down comes a fog—a clear thick ’un it
was—and they soon got off the path and were lost. It looked like ’em
having to _besh avrí_ (lie out) all night, as poor Jacob did. Only my
uncles didn’t see no silver ladder with angels dancing up and down on it,
and _mi dîri Duvel_ (God) sitting atop of it. But just as they were
about dead beat after poddling up and down for I can’t tell you how long,
they walked as nigh as nothing over the edge of a deep pit. It were a
narrow shave, for they only managed to save theirselves by clutching at
the bushes atop of the pit. Then what do you think, _baw_? They just
turned round, and there afore ’em stood a terrible crittur rearing itself
up and groaning loud. Their hearts was in their mouths. They thought
their time had come.
“‘If that ain’t a _mulo_ (ghost), my name’s not Fennix,’ whispered my
uncle.
“‘_Keka_’ (No); ‘it’s the wery _Beng_ (Devil) hisself,’ says Euri.
“And there they stands a-dithering like leaves, till at last my uncle
Fennix pulls hisself together and walks on a yard or two, staring hard
afore him, and weren’t Euri glad above a bit to hear his brother say in
his nat’ral voice, ‘Come on, it’s nobbut a blessed _dunnock_ (steer)
after all.’ And with that the crittur kicked up its heels and galloped
away, and by a bit of luck my uncles stumbled right on to a cartway as
led ’em straight to the tents.”
Among Gypsies, when the tale-telling mood is on, story will follow story,
often until drowsiness supervenes; for these folk dearly love a tale, and
are themselves possessed of no small store of family legends and
folk-narratives.
“Now, it’s your turn, sister. Let’s have that tale about Old Ruzlam
Boz’ll’s boy.”
Without stopping for a moment to think, Sibby began to reel off what was
evidently a well-known and favourite story, punctuating her sentences by
picking from her gown and flinging at me sundry prickly balls of burdock
seed, telling of what prowlings in the woods!
“It’s donkey’s ears (_i.e._ long years) since Ruzlam Boz’ll’s wife had a
baby boy born’d in a tent near a spring what bubbled out betwixt two
rocks, and every summer they used to _besh_ (rest) by the same spring.
By and by, when the dear little boy grew big enough, his mammy sent him
every morning to fill the kettle. But one day he got a surprise. There
on the grass by the spring what should he see but a new silver shilling.
Of course he picked it up and put it into his pocket, and never said
nothing about it when he got back to the tent. Next morning he found
double the money at the spring-head, and so it went on until his pockets
were chinking full of silver, and for all that he never breathed no word
about his luck. But one day Old Ruzlam heard the boy rattling the money
in his pockets, and forced him to tell where he got it from. Next
morning the daddy went off, laughing to hisself and thinking of the nice
heap of silver he was going to pick up, but after he had looked up and
down and all over, he found just nothing at all, leastways he saw no
money; but as he stood scratting his head, puzzled-like, there, on one
side of the spring, he saw a dear little teeny old man, and on the other
side a dear little teeny old woman, and, saying never a word, they
stooped down and flung water right into Ruzlam’s eyes. So away he ran
home, and there, if he didn’t find his boy had gone cross-eyed. What’s
more, he never came right agen.”
Thus, by pleasant steps amid scenes not lacking in glamour, I advanced
little by little in my knowledge of these fascinating straylings with
whom no stranger ever yet found it easy to mingle as one of themselves.