The daily morning journal and courier., 1894-11-17

ed iron kettle-stick. firmly embedded in the clay.
 Here is where our kettle sung. and where the sweet perch and luscious pike were broiled; while the smoke es- capped where It listed. It was kitchen and parlor in our boat-house. Necessa- ry utensils hung against the walls. but not quite hide many efforts at decora- tive art. from the illustrated papers, pasted solidly in their places and given rich and generous coloring from the smoke of burning ''hovers" of peat. Amidships was our salon. It was not large but. as "Gran'pop" Wharton al- ways remarked: "H'it 'as good prospects, an airy ones asidew
 It was covered by an old sail that had once done duty with the Yar- mouth herring fleet. Here our hearty meals were taken: and this place was also the work-room where the nimble fingers of the gipsies wrought the pouches and baskets of flag and osier. Beyond this, and extending to the end of the boat opposite that occupied at night by Gipsy Wharton and his wife, was little shed-like coop. and In this the gipsy grandfather. myself and few of the children had comfortable hunks; and above this, something after the fashion of the Upper deck" of will low-ware hawkers' wagons, was sail- | covered place where the stores of bas- kets and creels were kept until sold; the showroom as it were to the anglers and hunters of the lagoon.
 Then came the nights and days of this strange, quaint life with my gipsy friends among the "Broads." We seldom remained long at one mooring. There were countless cot-- tages of farmers, fenmen and marsh men to be visited; and the gipsies were welcome everywhere.
 | Old anglers and fowlers pausing in their wherries, gave cheery greetings. often made purchases, and never passed without flinging "white money" into our outlandish punt: while many of the passengers of pleasure yachts visited, patronized and tipped" us handsomely for our ever-ready secrets of where the perch and pike were hiding.
 | All day long 1t was greeting and part ing;-now a wherry with single occu- pant, fierce and restless in quest for game; now boat-load of roysterers, careless of all but carelessness and en- | joyment; now a market-boat being pooled" or rowed or both, to the mar ket village, the entire family on board as In Holland; and now perhaps some lone naturalist in hungry, harmless quest of rare butterflies and bugs.
 Then came evenings when the sun went down in forests of waving reeds
 flaming with the matches of some low-lying cottage on opposite shore, weirdly lighting the arms of the huge wind-mills of the region, bringing to a looming nearness the grim Norman towers of some far olden church, or gliding the top of some medieval ruin as with gold.
 As the red globe sank from sight, the waters for moment were purple, the reeds puce. and then, in another mo- ment, everything was pftchy black; un- til the stars, shining in the depths above and from the waters beneath. seemed to envelop all. Then the songs and chirps of myriad insects; the whir and splash of late-homing water-fowl; and the witching whispered soughing of the breeze in the brushes and the reeds. And then "Gran'pop" Wharton, hug ging his thin old fiddle to his thin old breast, played many a tuneful gipsy lullaby that seemd to merrily or plain | lively answer back the witch-tongues of the reeds; until, as the "peat-hovers" fiickered fainter and fainter in our cab in, all nature in the "Broads' seemed to fences and of dreams. | But all idyllic hours like these have their glad or rude awakening. l My confession is an unavoidable one that from the vagarous and genial mood of a happy, contented guest my feelings gradually merged into strange forebodings and unrest.
 l was in the presence of tremendous human study. In my wanderings had met scores of gipsies like old Gran pop'' Wharton; hundreds more like the stolid, philosophic father, calm and sun- ny fatalist in the face of all good or ill happening; thousands like the canny mother, marvel of cunning acquisition l duu lAIllcs dllo ICho ol lAouoo1oS 1lhG the happy-hearted chauvies of our house-boat for gipsy children are alike the world over in their endless out bursts of wild and irrepressible hilarity and mirth.
 ] But these three gipsy maidens, Fash ion. Melinda and Bess, startled me into new and limitless fields of thought and conjecture.
 Romany true in their keen and all most savage affection for any condition that would bring them and hold them close to the throbbings of nature's ten der heart, they were still unconsciously molded in the most winsome graces of chaste refinement. Marvellous in their knowledge of myriad passages from na- ture's open book masters of her most stealthily whispered and uncouth and gentle secrets, they also bore the added charm springing from quickened human sympathies, from the revelation of hu- man activities, from the uplifting and mellowing influences of music, art and books.
 | These things came to me in countless little surprises. They awakened pride in me that my friends, the despised gipsies, had precisely the same scapa- bilities of improvement and evolution