an's
character, upon a Gipsy who was pretending to "'ligious," and yet living
upon the money gained by his wife in telling fortunes. She said, "If I
must be ''ligious,' I would be ''ligious.' You might," said the old
woman, "as well eat the devil as suck his broth. Ah! I hate the fellow."
After asking her, and getting her interpretation of "God bless you" in
Romany, which is Mi-Doovel-Parik-tooti--and she was the only Gipsy round
London who could put the words in Romany--and some other conversation
accompanied with "coppers and baccy," &c., and to which she replied,
"Amen!" with as much earnestness as if she was the greatest saint outside
heaven, we parted.

Much has been said and written years ago about the chastity, fidelity,
and faithfulness of the Gipsies towards each other. This may have been
the case, and in a few exceptional cases it holds good now; but if I am
to believe these men themselves they are very isolated indeed, and what I
have said upon this point about the brick-yard _employes_ in my "Cry of
the Children from the Brick-yards of England," and also those living in
canal-boats, in "Our Canal Population," holds good, but with ten times
more force concerning the Gipsies. Immorality abounds to a most alarming
degree. Incest, wantonness, lasciviousness, lechery, whoring, bigamy,
and every other abomination low, degrading, carnal appetites, propensity,
and lust originate and encourage they practise openly, without the least
blush; in fact, I question if many of them know what it is to blush at
all.

I have heard a deal of disgusting, filthy language in my time among
brick-yard and canal-boat women, but not a tithe so sickening as among
some Gipsy women. I pitied them, and to look upon them as charitably as
possible I set it down to their extreme ignorance of the language they
used. A Gipsy at Upton Park last week named D--- gloried to my face in
the fact that he was not married. This same man has a brother not far
from Mitcham Common living with two sisters in an unlawful state.
Abraham Smith, a Gipsy at Upton Park, who is over seventy, and tells me
that he is trying to serve God and get to heaven, mentioned a case to me
of a Gipsy and a woman at Hackney Wick. The man has several children by
a woman now living with another man, and the woman has several children
by another man.

This Gipsy, S---, and his woman S---, turned both lots of their former
own children adrift upon the wide, wide world,