Synopsis:
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1881. Excerpt: ... "FACTS." 239 casts, they are very proud of being trusted, and under this influence will commit the most daring acts of honesty" (p. xi.). From "Gipsy Life in Lancashire and Cheshire" Papers of the Manchester Literary Club, 1877), by Mr H. T. Crofton:--" The older Gipsies can seldom read or write; but most of them are anxious that their children should learn the three R's, and usually send them to school during the winter months.... It may be added that, with the police at least, Gipsies have earned a good character.... It seems to be a common superstition that Gipsies are great thieves, but this is wrong." Romance, deception, imagery, lies, founded it may be, on twenty years of painful study; but what is study without the "eye to observe," that piercing organ, which contemplates an unfound remedy? Without it, one reads in the last English Census, of" 8025 persons in caravans and tents and in the open air," and can as little guess how many of these may be Gipsies, as from the total of Irish M.P.'s infer the strength of the Home Rule party. But with it, one discerns "between three and four thousand men and women, and eight or ten thousand children, classed in the Census as vagrants and vagabonds;" and straightway calculates that " there must be fully between fifteen and sixteen thousand Gipsies in England at the present time, four-fifths of whom are living in tents or vans." The calculation occurs in Mr Smith's latest publication, a letter to the Graphic (March 13, 1880), where he announces some valuable discoveries,--that Firdusi was an Arab writer of the year 1126; that Gipsies are also called Lyuths; that they arrived before Constantinople at the end of the fourteenth and early in the fifteenth century; and that they entered Scotland about the year 1514....
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