oing to sit the same afternoon for a leading artist
upon a throne as a Spanish queen. In another part of London--Mary
Place--I found a family of Gipsies living under sticks and rags in the
most filthy, sickening, and disgusting backyard I have ever been into--to
such an extent was the stench that immediately I came out of it I had to
get a little brandy or I should have fainted--the eldest girl of whom had
her time pretty fully taken up by sitting as an artist's model in the
costume of a peasant girl, sometimes gathering buttercups and daisies, at
other times gathering roses and making button-holes for gentlemen's coats
and placing them there with gentle hands and a smiling face; occasionally
she would be painted as a country milk-girl driving the cows to pasture;
at other times as a young lady playing at croquet on the lawn and
gambolling with children. What a contrast, what a delusion! from rags to
silks and satins; from a filthy abode not fit for pigs to a palace; from
turnips and diseased bacon to wine and biscuits; from beds of rotten
straw to crimson and gold-covered chairs; from trampling among dead cats
to a carpet composed of wild flowers; from "Get out you wretch and fetch
some money, no matter how," to "Come here, my dear, is there anything I
can do for you?" from the stench of a cesspool to the fragrance of the
honeysuckle and sweetbriar, in one word, from hell to heaven all in an
hour--such is one side of Gipsy life among the little Gipsies, not one of
whom can read a sentence or write one word, and it is in this way Gipsy
girls are found exposing their bodies to keep their big, healthy brothers
and fathers at home in idleness and sin. Two such Gipsy girls have come
under my own notice, and no doubt there are scores of similar cases.
Gipsy children are fond of a great degree of heat, and sometimes lie so
near to the coke fires as to be in danger of burning. I have seen them
with their faces as red as if they were upon the point of being roasted,
and yet they can bear to travel in the severest cold bare-headed, with no
other covering than some old rags carelessly thrown over them. The cause
of their bodily qualities, at least some of them, arises from their
education and hardy manner of life. Formerly the Gipsies, when there was
less English blood in their veins, could stand the extreme changes and
hardships of the English climate much better than now. An Englishman,
notwithstanding the fact that he has