--with his wife
ill at the same time in the tent--sickened, died, and was 'laid out' by
him, and it was also buried out of one of those wretched abodes on the
roadside at Barrow-upon-Soar, last January. When the poor thing died he
had not sixpence in his pocket. In shaking hands with him as we parted
his face beamed with gladness, and he said that I was the first who had
held out the hand to him during the last twenty years. At another time
later on I came across Bazena Clayton, who said that she had had sixteen
children, fifteen of whom are alive, several of them being born in a
roadside tent. She says that she was married out of one of these tents;
and her brother died and was buried out of a tent at Packington, near
Ashby-de-la-Zouch. This poor woman knows about three hundred families of
Gipsies in eleven of the Midland and Eastern counties, and has herself,
so she says, four lots of Gipsies travelling in Lincolnshire at the
present time. She said she could not read herself, and thinks that not
one Gipsy in twenty can. She has travelled all her life. Her mother,
named Smith, of whom there are not a few, is the mother of fifteen
children, all of whom were born in a tent. A Gipsy lives, but one can
scarcely tell how; they generally locate for a time near hen-roosts,
potato-camps, turnip-fields, and game-preserves. They sell a few
clothes-lines and clothes-pegs, but they seldom use such things
themselves. Washing would destroy their beauty. Telling fortunes to
servant girls and old maids is a source of income to some of them. They
sleep, but in many instances lie crouched together, like so many dogs,
regardless of either sex or age. They have blood, bone, muscle, and
brains, which are applied in many instances to wrong purposes. To have
between three and four thousand men and women, and fifteen thousand
children classed in the census as vagrants and vagabonds, roaming all
over the country, in ignorance and evil training, that carries peril with
it, is not a pleasant look-out for the future; and I claim on the grounds
of justice and equity, that if these poor children, living in vans and
tents and under old carts, are to be allowed to live in these places,
they shall be registered in a manner analogous to the Canal Boats Act of
1877, so that the children may be brought under the Compulsory Clauses of
the Education Acts, and become Christianised and civilised as other
children."

The foregoing letter, as it