Gipsies are certainly good sportsmen, after their own fashion. But one
seldom hears of a gipsy shooting with a gun; the gun speaks too loudly.
The gipsy makes sport with dogs, ferrets, and nets. He takes no open
risks; he holds it to be a disgraceful thing to be caught red-handed.
And if caught he never makes confession. No matter how red his hands,
there is always an excuse. His horse is found feeding, perhaps, on the
farmer's crops. Then the horse must have broken loose unbeknown. Or his
dog crosses the road, leveret in mouth. Then, "He picked un up dead,
killed by a stoat what I seed a-sniffin' about." His dog has snapped
up a sitting partridge. "It must be one as they beggarin' foxes 'ave
killed." Or the gipsy himself, hunting a rabbit in a hedge, is taken
in the act of knocking over the rabbit with his stick. All was done in
mistake for a rat. The keeper remarks that he has lost a fine clutch
of eggs--olive-brown eggs: he hints that the gipsy knows something
about it. Innocently comes the question: "They sart o' eggs be pison,
bain't they?" If caught with nets and ferrets on a rabbit burrow, a
fine tale he has to tell of poachers who ran away at his approach,
leaving all their tackle.
A keeper, who had strict orders to allow no gipsies to stop on his
ground, one day came across a strong swarm, and saw clearly that they
intended to stay the night. But in reply to his marching orders, they
pleaded that they wished to stay only long enough to make some tea;
they promised they would be gone by the time the keeper returned, in a
couple of hours. So he went away, but went no farther than behind the
nearest hedge: whence he heard himself described in a picturesque and
blood-curdling fashion, and heard the declaration also that the gipsies
had no intention of budging an inch for such a blue-livered, red-nosed
piece of pulp as he. Thereupon the keeper took a run and a jump, and
landed his eighteen stone self and his leaded stick in the gipsies'
midst, sending their pots and pans far-flying. The gipsies snatched
burning sticks from the fire, and a desperate fight began, but they
soon had enough of that eighteen stone of angry keeper.
* * * * *