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.
It is the nature of the oak to be still, it is the nature of the hawk to
roam with the wind. The Anglo-Saxon labourer remains in his cottage
generation after generation, 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.
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