ruined castles, belong to the ready-made operatic poetry of the
world, from which the last thrill has long since departed. They
are, so to say, public poetry, the public property of the
emotions, and no longer touch the private heart or stir the
private imagination. Our fathers felt so much about them that
there is nothing left for us to feel. They are as a rose whose
fragrance has been exhausted by greedy and indiscriminate
smelling. I would rather find a little Surrey common for myself
and idle about it a summer day, with the other geese and donkeys,
than climb the tallest Alp.

Most gipsies are merely tenth-rate provincial companies,
travelling with and villainously travestying Borrow's great
pieces of "Lavengro" and "Romany Rye." Dirty, ill-looking,
scowling men; dirty, slovenly, and wickedly ugly women; children
to match, snarling, filthy little curs, with a ready beggar's
whine on occasion. A gipsy encampment to-day is little more than
a moving slum, a scab of squalor on the fair face of the
countryside.

But there was one little trifle of an incident that touched me as
I passed this particular caravan. Evidently one of the vans had
come to grief, and several men of the party were making a great
show of repairing it. After I had run the gauntlet of the
begging children, and was just out of ear- shot of the group, I
turned round to survey it from a distance. It was encamped on a
slight rise of the undulating road, and from where I stood tents
and vans and men were clearly silhouetted against the sky. The
road ran through and a little higher than the encampment, which
occupied both sides of it. Presently the figure of a young man