Familiar as I was with, the better class of Welsh Gypsies, the camp
here was the best display of Romany well-being I had ever seen. It
would, indeed, have surprised those who associate all Gypsy life with
the squalor which in England, and especially near London, marks the
life of the mongrel wanderers who are so often called Gypsies. In a
lovely dingle, skirted by a winding, willow-bordered river, and
dotted here and there with clumps of hawthorn, were ranged the
'living-waggons' of those trading Romanies who had accompanied the
'Griengroes' to the East Anglian and Midland fairs.
Alongside the waggons was a single large brown tent that for
luxuriousness might have been the envy of all Gypsydom. On the
hawthorn bushes and the grass was spread, instead of the poor rags
that one often sees around a so-called Gypsy encampment, snowy
linen, newly washed. The ponies and horses were scattered about the
Dell feeding.
I soon distinguished Sinfi's commanding figure near that gorgeous
living-waggon of 'orange-yellow colour with red window-blinds' in
which she had persuaded me to invest my money at Chester.
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