FOOTNOTES.

This letter brought forth a reply, to which I rejoined as follows:

“Your correspondent’s repudiation of my statements in your issue of the 5th inst. does not alter the facts—not ‘ideas’—which were given to me by the travellers themselves in broad daylight in the midst of a pouring rain, with the object of getting their condition improved, not by winking and blinking at the evil and allowing it to grow into a more dangerous sore, to be dealt with by the policeman, but to be faced by extending the blessings of a free education to all travelling children, and bringing sanitation to their homes. His statements about immorality have been manufactured by himself; but as he has been good enough to take my references and weave them into a cap which fits, I must allow him the pleasure of wearing it. The sad facts, seen by myself, in my possession, in addition to those published in my ‘Gipsy Life,’ will most assuredly come to light some day. With reference to his remarks about no gipsy vans being at Oxford fair, this is absolutely untrue. I look upon all as gipsies who, with gipsy blood in their veins, are tramping the country, hawking and adopting gipsy usages, customs, slang, and ‘rokering,’ if only slightly. The fact is the old-fashioned gipsies are dead, and their places are being taken by increasing numbers of travellers who are not so romantic, living in covered carts and waggons, whose wives sometimes scrape together a little money in the summer to keep many of the men in idleness in the winter. Your correspondent takes credit for the education of the children in the winter. This he knows perfectly well is what the law requires of those who have settled homes, but he is silent about the worse than undoing the teachers’ work in the summer; thereby placing the poor gipsy children upon the vagabond’s path to ruin. Of course all are not alike. There are the usual good, bad, and indifferent among them. The sad condition, morally, socially, and religiously, of many of the poor gipsy and other travelling women and children is truly horrible, and no amount of wincing at the shadow of redeeming features which are to follow will stop me till the 70,000 canal and gipsy children are educated by means of a free pass book, the hard lot of the women lightened, and their travelling homes made more happy and conformable with civilized notions and ideas; and if he is wise he will help forward the work, with a willing hand.”