must be greasy with being climbed.

Besides, the Alps and the gipsies, in common with waterfalls and ruined
castles, belong to the ready-made operatic poetry of the world, from
which the last thrill has long since departed. They are, so to say,
public poetry, the public property of the emotions, and no longer touch
the private heart or stir the private imagination. Our fathers felt so
much about them that there is nothing left for us to feel. They are as
a rose whose fragrance has been exhausted by greedy and indiscriminate
smelling. I would rather find a little Surrey common for myself and
idle about it a summer day, with the other geese and donkeys, than
climb the tallest Alp.

Most gipsies are merely tenth-rate provincial companies, travelling
with and villainously travestying Borrow's great pieces of "Lavengro"
and "Romany Rye." Dirty, ill-looking, scowling men; dirty, slovenly,
and wickedly ugly women; children to match, snarling, filthy little
curs, with a ready beggar's whine on occasion. A gipsy encampment
to-day is little more than a moving slum, a scab of squalor on the fair
face of the countryside.

But there was one little trifle of an incident that touched me as I
passed this particular caravan. Evidently one of the vans had come to
grief, and several men of the party were making a great show of
repairing it. After I had run the gauntlet of the begging children,
and was just out of ear-shot of the group, I turned round to survey it
from a distance. It was encamped on a slight rise of the undulating
road, and from where I stood tents and vans and men were clearly
silhouetted against the sky. The road ran through and a little higher
than the encampment, which occupied both sides of it. Presently the
figure of a young man separated itself from the rest, stept up on to
the smooth road, and standing in the middle of it, in an absorbed
attitude, began to make a movement with his hands as though winding
string round a top. That in fact was his occupation, and for the next
five minutes he kept thus winding the cord, flinging the top to the
ground, and intently bending down to catch it on his hand, none of the
others, not even the children, taking the slightest notice of him,--he
entirely alone there with his poor little pleasure. There seemed to me
pathos in his loneliness. Had some one spun the top with him, it would
have vanished; and presently, no doubt at the bidding of an oath I
could not hear,