JUST BEFORE WINTER. t6t 



of the hawk to roam with the wind. The Anglo-Saxon 

 labourer remains in his cottage generation after genera- 

 tion, ploughing the same fields ; the express train may 

 rush by, but he feels no wish to rush with it ; he scarcely 

 turns to look at it ; all the note he takes is that it marks 

 the time to ' knock off' and ride the horses home. And 

 if hard want at last forces him away,, and he emigrates, 

 he would as soon jog to the port in a waggon, a week on 

 the road, as go by steam ; as soon voyage in a sailing 

 ship as by the swift Cunarder. The swart gipsy, like 

 the hawk, for ever travels on, but, like the hawk, that 

 seems to have no road, and yet returns to the same 

 trees, so he, winding in circles of which we civilised 

 people do not understand the map, comes, in his own 

 times and seasons, home to the same waste spot, and 

 cooks his savoury bouillon by the same beech. They 

 have camped here for so many years that it is impossible 

 to trace when they did not ; it is wild still, like them- 

 selves. Nor has their nature changed any more than 

 the nature of the trees. 



The gipsy loves the crescent moon, the evening star, 

 the clatter of the fern-owl, the beetle's hum. He was 

 born on the earth in the tent, and he has lived like a 

 species of human wild animal ever since. Of his own 

 free will he will have nothing to do wdth rites or 

 litanies : he may perhaps be married in a place of 

 worship — to make it legal, that is all. At the end, were 

 it not for the law, he would for choice be buried beneath 

 the ' fireplace ' of their children's children. He will 

 not dance to the pipe ecclesiastic, sound it who may — 

 Churchman, Dissenter, priest, or laic. Like the trees, he 

 is simply indifferent. All the great wave of teaching 

 and text and tracts and missions and the produce of the 

 printing-press has made no impression upon his race 



M 



