the
country, dressed in beaver hats and bonnets, scarlet cloaks and hoods,
short petticoats, velvet coats with silver buttons, and a plentiful
supply of gold rings. The novelty of their person, with dark skin and
eyes, black hair, and their fortune-telling proclivities, and other odd
curiosities and eccentricities, answered well for a time as a kind of
eye-blinder to their little thefts and like things; but that day is over.
Their silver buttons are all gone to pot. Their silk velvet coats, plush
waistcoats, and diamond rings have vanished, never more to return with
their present course of life; patched breeches, torn coats, slouched
hats, and washed gold rings have taken their places, and ragged garments
in place of silk dresses for the poor Gipsy women. The Gipsy men
"lollock" about, the women tell fortunes, and the children gambol on the
ditch banks with impunity, nobody caring to interfere with them in any
way. This kind of thing, as regards dash and show, is to a great extent
passed, and those men who put on a show of work at all, it is as a
general thing at tinkering, chair-mending, peg-splitting, skewer-making,
and donkey buying. The men make the skewers and sell them at prices
varying from one shilling to two shillings per stone; the wood for the
skewers they do not always buy. A friend of mine told me a couple of
months since that the Gipsies had broken down his fences with impunity,
and had taken five hundred young saplings out of his plantation for this
purpose. Chairs are bottomed at prices ranging from one shilling and
upwards. Some of them do scissor-grinding, for which they charge
exorbitant prices. Sir G. H. Beaumont, Bart., of Coleorton Hall, told me
very recently that one of the Boswell gang had charged him two shillings
for grinding one knife. Some of the women, who are not good hands at
fortune-telling, sell artificial flowers, combs, brushes, lace, &c. The
women who are good at fortune-telling can make a good thing out of it,
even at this late day, in the midst of so much light and Christianity,
and they carry it out very adroitly and cleverly too. Two or three
months ago I was invited by some Gipsy friends to have tea with them on
the outskirts of London. They very kindly sent for twopenny worth of
butter for me, and allowed me the honour of using the only cup and
saucer, which they said were over one hundred years old. The tea for the
grown-up sons and daughters was handed round in mug