I have seen them on their return to their wigwams, in the
depth of winter, with six inches of snow on the ground, and scantily
clad, and with six little children crying round them for bread. No fire
in the tent, and her husband idling about in other tents. In cases of
confinements, the men have to do something, or they would all starve.
For a few days they wake up out of their idle dreams. I know of Gipsy
women who have trudged along with their loads, and their children at
their heels, to within the last five minutes of their confinement. The
children were literally born under the hedge bottom, and without any tent
or protection whatever. A Gipsy woman told me a week or two since that
her mother had told her that she was born under the hedge bottom in
Bagworth Lane, in Leicestershire. When I questioned her on the subject,
she rather gloried in the fact that they had not time to stick the
tent-sticks into the ground. This kind of disgraceful procedure is not
far removed from that of animals. I should think that I am speaking
within compass when I state that two-thirds of the Gipsies travelling
about the country have been born under what they call the "hedge bottom,"
_i.e._, in tents and like places. The Gipsy women use no cradles; the
child, as a rule, sleeps on the ground. When a boy attains three years
of age, so says Hoyland, the rags he was wrapped in are thrown on one
side, and he is equally exposed with the parents to the severest weather.
He is then put to trial to see how far his legs will carry him. Clayton
told me that when he was a boy of about twelve, his father sent him into
the town and among the villages--with no other covering upon him only a
piece of an old shirt--to bring either bread or money home, no matter
how.

Among some of the State projects put forth in Hungary more than a century
since to improve the condition of the Gipsies, the following may be
mentioned: (1) They were prohibited from dwelling in huts and tents, from
wandering up and down the country, from dealing in horses, from eating
animals which died of themselves and carrion. (2) They were to be called
New Boors instead of Gipsies, and they were not to converse in any other
language but that of any of the countries in which they chose to reside.
(3) After some months from the passing of the Act, they were to quit
their Gipsy manner of life and settle, like the other inhabitants, in
cities or villages, and to provide themselves