Near by lies a black magpie's feather, spotted with round dots of
white.
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: vegetables, 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
_bouillons_--not for him, not he; he would rather munch 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 is a 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.
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