JUST BEFORE WINTER. 161 
, 
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 ina 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 douzllon 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 bectle’s hum. He was 
born on the earth inthe 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 with rites or 
litanies: he may perhaps be married in a place of 
worship—-to make it legal, that is all. At the end, werc 
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 
