rather have a sensation than a stagnation.
Those boys sat up. I said, "We are going to talk about gipsy life." I
talked to them about the origin of my people. There's not a man living
in the world who knows the origin of my people. I can trace my people
back to India, but they didn't come from India. We are one of the oldest
races in the world, so old that nobody knows how old. I talked to them
about the origin of the gipsies, and I don't know it, but I knew more
about it than they did. I talked to them about our language, and I gave
them specimens of it, and there I was on sure ground. It is a beautiful
language, full of poetry and music. Then I talked about the way the
gipsies get their living--and other people's; and for thirty minutes those
Munsters hardly knew if they were on the chairs or on the floor--and I
purposely made them laugh. They had just come out of the hell of the
trenches. They had that haunted, weary, hungry look, and if only I
could make them laugh and forget the hell out of which they had just
climbed it was religion, and I wasn't wasting time.
When I had been talking for thirty minutes, I stopped, and said, "Boys,
there's a lot more to this story. Would you like some more?"
"Yes," they shouted.
"Come back to-morrow," I said.
I was fishing in unlikely waters, and if you leave off when fish are
hungry they will come back for more. For six nights I told those boys
gipsy stories. I took them out into the woods. We went out amongst the
rabbits. I told the boys the rabbits got very fond of me--so fond that
they used to go home with me! I took them through the clover-fields on
a June day and made them smell the perfume. I took them among the
buttercups. I told them it was the Finger of Love and the Smile of
Infinite Wisdom that put the spots upon the pansy and the deep blue in
the violet. And then we went out among the birds and we saw God
taking songs from the lips of a seraph and wrapping them round with
feathers.
And the boys saw Jesus in every buttercup and every primrose, and
every little daisy, and in every dewdrop, and heard something of the
song of the angels in the notes of the nightingale and the skylark. Oh!
Jesus was there, and they felt Him, and they saw Him. I took them
amongst the gipsy tents, amongst the woodlands and dells of the old
camping-grounds. They walked with Him and they talked with Him. I
didn't use the usual Church language, but I used the language of God in
Nature and the boys heard Him.
Towards the end of the week one of those Munster boys came and
touched me and said, "Your Riverence! Your Riverence!" he says.
"You're a gentleman."
I knew I had got that boy.
Now, if you are an old angler you know what happens if you begin to
tug at the line the first time you get a bite. When you hook a fish, if he
happens to be a Munster, you have got to keep your head and play him,
let him have the line, let him go, keep steady, no excitement, give him
play. I gave him a bit of line, that young Munster. I thanked him for his
compliment and then walked away--with my eyes over my shoulder,
for if he hadn't come after me I should have been after him.
Presently he pulled my tunic and said, "Won't you give me a minute,
sir?"
"What's the trouble?" I said.
"Sir," he said, with a little catch in his voice that I can hear now,
"you've got something I haven't."
"How do you know?" I asked.
"It's like the singing of a little song, and it gets into my heart. I want it.
Won't you tell me how to get it? I want it."
"Sonny," I said, "it's for you. You can have it at the same price I paid
for it."
"Begorra," says he, "you will tell me to give up my religion, you will!"
I said, "If God has put anything in your life that helps you to be a better
and a nobler and a braver man, He doesn't want you to give it up."
"He doesn't?" he asked. "What am I to give up, then?"
And I replied, "Your sin."
The boy said again, "You're a gentleman."
If I had said one word about his religion or his creed, my line would
have snapped and I would have lost my fish.
That night, when all
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