160 FIELD AND HEDGEROW. 
At the edge of the trees stands an old timbered 
farmstead, whose gables and dark lines of wood have 
not been painted in the memory of man, dull and 
weather-beaten, but very homely ; and by it rises the 
delicate cone of a new oast-house, the tiles on which are 
of the brightest red. Lines of bluish smoke ascend 
from among the bracken of the wild open ground, where 
a tribe of gipsies have pitched their camp.. Three of 
the vans are time-stained and travel-worn, with dull red 
roofs ; the fourth is brightly picked out with fresh yellow 
paint, and stands a marked object at the side. Orange- 
red beeches rise beyond them on the slope; two hoop- 
tents, or kibitkas, just large enough to creep into, are 
near the fires, where the women are cooking the gipsy’s 
bouillon, that savoury stew of all things good: vege- 
tables, meat, and scraps, and savouries, collected as it 
were in the stock-pot from twenty miles round. Hodge, 
the stay-at-home, sturdy carter, eats bread and cheese 
and poor bacon sometimes ; he looks with true British 
scorn on all scraps and soups, and stock-pots and 
bouzllons—not for him, not he; he would rather munclr 
dry bread and cheese for every meal all the year round, 
though he could get bits as easy as the other and without 
begging. The gipsy isa cook. The man with a gold 
ring in his ear; the woman with a silver ring on her 
finger, coarse black snaky hair like a horse’s mane; the 
boy with naked olive feet; dark eyes all of them, and 
an Oriental, sidelong look, and a strange inflection of 
tone that turns our common English words into a foreign 
language—there they camp in the fern, in the sun, their 
Eastern donkeys of Syria scattered round them, their 
children rolling about like foals in the grass, a bit out of 
the distant Orient under our Western oaks. 
It is the nature of the oak to be still, it is the nature 
