Yankee Gypsies | Page 9

charity. The regular "old stragglers" regarded her
as an unfailing friend; and the sight of her plain cap was to them an
assurance of forthcoming creature-comforts. There was indeed a tribe
of lazy strollers, having their place of rendezvous in the town of
Barrington, New Hampshire, whose low vices had placed them beyond
even the pale of her benevolence. They were not unconscious of their
evil reputation; and experience had taught them the necessity of
concealing, under well-contrived disguises, their true character. They
came to us in all shapes and with all appearances save the true one,
with most miserable stories of mishap and sickness and all "the ills
which flesh is heir to." It was particularly vexatious to discover, when
too late, that our sympathies and charities had been expended upon
such graceless vagabonds as the "Barrington beggars." An old withered
hag, known by the appellation of Hopping Pat,--the wise woman of her
tribe,--was in the habit of visiting us, with her hopeful grandson, who
had "a gift for preaching" as well as for many other things not exactly
compatible with holy orders. He sometimes brought with him a tame
crow, a shrewd, knavish-looking bird, who, when in the humor for it,

could talk like Barnaby Rudge's raven. He used to say he could "do
nothin' at exhortin' without a white handkercher on his neck and money
in his pocket,"--a fact going far to confirm the opinions of the Bishop
of Exeter and the Puseyites generally, that there can be no priest
without tithes and surplice.
These people have for several generations lived distinct from the great
mass of the community, like the gypsies of Europe, whom in many
respects they closely resemble. They have the same settled aversion to
labor and the same disposition to avail themselves of the fruits of the
industry of others. They love a wild, out-of-door life, sing songs, tell
fortunes, and have an instinctive hatred of "missionaries and cold
water." It has been said--I know not upon what grounds--that their
ancestors were indeed a veritable importation of English gypsyhood;
but if so, they have undoubtedly lost a good deal of the picturesque
charm of its unhoused and free condition. I very much fear that my
friend Mary Russell Mitford,--sweetest of England's rural
painters,--who has a poet's eye for the fine points in gypsy character,
would scarcely allow their claims to fraternity with her own vagrant
friends, whose camp-fires welcomed her to her new home at
Swallowfield.(1) (1) See in Miss Mitford's *Our Village.*
"The proper study of mankind is man;" and, according to my view, no
phase of our common humanity is altogether unworthy of investigation.
Acting upon this belief two or three summers ago, when making, in
company with my sister, a little excursion into the hill-country of New
Hampshire, I turned my horse's head towards Barrington for the
purpose of seeing these semi-civilized strollers in their own home, and
returning, once for all, their numerous visits. Taking leave of our
hospitable cousins in old Lee with about as much solemnity as we may
suppose Major Laing(1) parted with his friends when he set out in
search of desert-girdled Timbuctoo, we drove several miles over a
rough road, passed the Devil's Den unmolested, crossed a fretful little
streamlet noisily working its way into a valley, where it turned a lonely,
half-ruinous mill, and, climbing a steep hill beyond, saw before us a
wide, sandy level, skirted on the west and north by low, scraggy hills,
and dotted here and there with dwarf pitch-pines. In the centre of this
desolate region were some twenty or thirty small dwellings, grouped
together as irregularly as a Hottentot kraal. Unfenced, unguarded, open

to all comers and goers, stood that city of the beggars,--no wall or
paling between the ragged cabins to remind one of the jealous
distinctions of property. The great idea of its founders seemed visible in
its unappropriated freedom. Was not the whole round world their own?
and should they haggle about boundaries and title-deeds? For them, on
distant plains, ripened golden harvests; for them, in far-off workshops,
busy hands were toiling; for them, if they had but the grace to note it,
the broad earth put on her garniture of beauty, and over them hung the
silent mystery of heaven and its stars. That comfortable philosophy
which modern transcendentalism has but dimly shadowed forth--that
poetic agrarianism, which gives all to each and each to all--is the real
life of this city of unwork. To each of its dingy dwellers might be not
unaptly applied the language of one who, I trust, will pardon me for
quoting her beautiful poem in this connection:--
"Other hands may grasp the field and forest, Proud proprietors in pomp
may shine, . . . . . . . Thou art