and day, while the sun
paints their cheeks the colour of the ancient Egyptians. Our Gipsies
have always been a favourite study with ethnological folk; poets have
sung their wild, free life, and painters have taken them as types of the
happy, if the careless; while philanthropists have occasionally gone
amongst them, and told pitiful tales of their degradation, ignorance, and
misery. It was not from any feeling of romance or pity that we were
induced the other day to accept an invitation from Mr. George Smith, of
Coalville, to spend a few hours amongst some of these people. Mr. George
Smith's life has been devoted to the amelioration of the condition of
many very poor and almost entirely neglected classes of the community,
and it was pleasant to have the opportunity of going with such a
simple-hearted hero amongst those in whom he takes a deep interest.
Having devoted many years of his life to the poor brick-yard children,
and afterwards to the children labouring in canal-boats, he has found one
more class still left outside every Act of Parliament, and beyond every
chance of being helped in the right way to earn an honest living and
become industrious members of society. These are the Gipsies and their
children, who have been let alone so severely by all so-called
right-thinking men and women that there is great danger of their becoming
a sore evil in our midst. Unable to read or write--their powers of
thought thereby cramped--with no one to look after them, separated from
the people in whose midst they live, there can be little wonder that they
should grow up with certain loose notions about right and wrong, and a
manner of life the reverse of that which prevails amongst Christian
people; but, now that Mr. George Smith has got his eyes and his heart
fixed upon them, there will surely be something done which, in the near
future, will redeem these people from many of the disadvantages under
which they labour, and add to the body corporate a tribe possessed of
many amiable characteristics. Mr. Smith never takes up more than one
thing at a time, and upon the accomplishment of it he concentrates all
his energies. This attribute is the one which has enabled him to carry
to successful conclusions the acts for the relief of the brick-yard and
the canal-boat children; but while he is about a work he becomes
thoroughly possessed by his subject, and the most important event that
may happen for the country, or for the world,