kitchen and
table requirements are an earthen pot, an iron pan, which serves as a
dish, a knife, and a spoon. When the meal is ready the whole family sit
round the pot or pan, and then "fall to it" with their fingers and teeth,
Adam's knives and forks, and the ground providing the table and plates.
Boiled pork is, as a rule, their universal, every-day, central
pot-boiler, and the longer it is boiled the harder it gets, like the
Irishman who boiled his egg for an hour to get it soft, and then had to
give it up as a bad job. Some of these kind-hearted folks have, on more
than one occasion, given me "a feed" of it. It is sweet and nice, but
awfully satisfying, and I think two meals would last me for a week very
comfortably; all I should require would be to get a good dinner off their
knuckle-bones, roll myself up like a hedgehog, doze off like Hubert
Petalengro into a semi-unconscious state, and I should be all right for
three or four days. "Beggars must not be choosers." They have done what
they could to make me comfortable, and for which I have been very
thankful. I have had many a cup of tea with them, and hope to do so
again.

One writer observes:--"Commend me to Gipsy life and hard living. Robust
exercise, out-door life, and pleasant companions are sure to beget good
dispositions both of body and mind, and would create a stomach under the
very ribs of death capable of digesting a bar of pig-iron." Their habits
of uncleanliness are most disgusting. Occasionally you will meet with
clean people, and children with clean, red, chubby faces; but in nine
cases out of ten they are of parents who have had a different bringing up
than squatting about in the mud and filth. One woman I know at Notting
Hill, and who was born in an Oxfordshire village, is at the present time
surrounded with filth of the most sickening kind, which she cannot help,
and to her credit manages to keep her children tolerably clean and nice
for a woman of her position. There is another at Garrett Lane,
Wandsworth; another at Sheepcot Lane, Battersea; two at Upton Park; one
at Cherry Island; two at Hackney Wick, and several others in various
parts on the outskirts of London. At Hackney Wick I saw twenty tents and
vans, connected with which there were forty men and women and about
seventy children of all ages, entirely devoid of all sanitary
arrangements. A gentleman who was building some property in the
neighbourhood told me that he had seen g