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TITLE: YANKEE GYPSIES
AUTHOR: JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER
EBOOK: E05435 (O'Briens Book Cellar)

Yankee Gypsies

by John Greenleaf Whittier

"Here's to budgets, packs, and wallets;
Here's to all the wandering train."
BURNS.(1)

I CONFESS it, I am keenly sensitive to "skyey influences."
(2)  I profess no indifference to the movements of that
capricious old gentleman known as the clerk of the weather.  I
cannot conceal my interest in the behavior of that patriarchal
bird whose wooden similitude gyrates on the church spire. 
Winter proper is well enough.  Let the thermometer go to zero
if it will; so much the better, if thereby the very winds are
frozen and unable to flap their stiff wings.  Sounds of bells in
the keen air, clear, musical, heart-inspiring; quick tripping of
fair moccasined feet on glittering ice pavements; bright eyes
glancing above the uplifted muff like a sultana's behind the
folds of her *yashmak;*(3) schoolboys coasting down street
like mad Greenlanders; the cold brilliance of oblique sunbeams
flashing back from wide surfaces of glittering snow, or blazing
upon ice jewelry of tree and roof: there is nothing in all this to
complain of.  A storm of summer has its redeeming
sublimities,--its slow, upheaving mountains of cloud glooming
in the western horizon like new-created volcanoes, veined
with fire, shattered by exploding thunders.  Even the wild
gales of the equinox have their varieties,--sounds of wind-
shaken woods and waters, creak and clatter of sign and
casement, hurricane puffs, and down-rushing rain-spouts.  But
this dull, dark autumn day of thaw and rain, when the very
clouds seem too spiritless and languid to storm outright or
take themselves out of the way of fair weather; wet beneath
and above, reminding one of that rayless atmosphere of
Dante's Third Circle, where the infernal Priessnitz(4)
administers his hydropathic torment,--

"A heavy, cursed, and relentless drench,--
 The land it soaks is putrid;"

or rather, as everything animate and inanimate is seething in
warm mist, suggesting the idea that Nature, grown old and
rheumatic, is trying the efficacy of a Thomsonian steam-box(5)
on a grand scale; no sounds save the heavy plash of muddy
feet on the pavements; the monotonous, melancholy drip from
trees and roofs; the distressful gurgling of waterducts,
swallowing the dirty amalgam of the gutters; a dim, leaden-
colored horizon of only a few yards in diameter, shutting down
about one, beyond which nothing is visible save in faint line or
dark projection; the ghost of a church spire or the eidolon of a
chimney-pot,--he who can extract pleasurable emotions from
the alembic of such a day has a trick of alchemy with which I
am wholly unacquainted.

(1) From the closing air in *The Jolly Beggars,* a cantata.
(2)                             "A breath thou art
      Servile to all the skyey influences,
      That dost this habitation, where thou keep'st
      Hourly afflict."
          Shakespeare: *Measure for Measure,* act III. scene 1.
(3) "She turns and turns again, and carefully glances around
her on all sides, to see that she is safe from the eyes of
Mussulmans, and then suddenly withdrawing the yashmak she
shines upon your heart and soul with all the pomp and might of
her beauty." Kinglake's *Eothen,* chap. iii.  In a note to
*Yashmak* Kinglake explains that it is not a mere semi-
transparent veil, but thoroughly conceals all the features except
the eyes: it is withdrawn by being pulled down.
(4) Vincenz Priessnitz was the originator of the water-cure.
After experimenting upon himself and his neighbors he took up
the profession of hydropathy and established baths at his native
place, Grafenberg in Silesia, in 1829.  He died in 1851.
(5) Dr. Samuel Thomson, a New Hampshire physician,
advocated the use of the steam bath as a restorer of system
when diseased.  He died in 1843 and left behind an
autobiography (*Life and Medical Discoveries*) which
contains a record of the persecutions he underwent.

Hark! a rap at my door.  Welcome anybody just now.  One
gains nothing by attempting to shut out the sprites of the
weather.  They come in at the keyhole; they peer through the
dripping panes; they insinuate themselves through the crevices
of the casement, or plump down chimney astride of the
raindrops.

I rise and throw open the door.  A tall, shambling, loose-
jointed figure; a pinched, shrewd face, sun-brown and wind-
dried; small, quick-winking black eyes,--there he stands, the
water dripping from his pulpy hat and ragged elbows.

I speak to him; but he returns no answer.  With a dumb
show of misery, quite touching, he hands me a soiled piece of
parchment, whereon I read what purports to be a melancholy
account of shipwreck and disaster, to the particular detriment,
loss, and damnification of one Pietro Frugoni, who is, in
consequence, sorely in want of the alms of all charitable
Christian persons, and who is, in short, the bearer of this
veracious document, duly certified and indorsed by an Italian
consul in one of our Atlantic cities, of a high-sounding, but to
Yankee organs unpronounceable, name.

Here commences a struggle.  Every man, the Mahometans
tell us, has two attendant angels,--the good one on his right
shoulder, the bad on his left.  "Give," says Benevolence, as
with some difficulty I fish up a small coin from the depths of
my pocket.  "Not a cent," says selfish Prudence; and I drop it
from my fingers.  "Think," says the good angel, "of the poor
stranger in a strange land, just escaped from the terrors of the
sea-storm, in which his little property has perished, thrown
half-naked and helpless on our shores, ignorant of our
language, and unable to find employment suited to his
capacity."  "A vile impostor!" replies the left-hand sentinel;
"his paper purchased from one of those ready-writers in New
York who manufacture beggar-credentials at the low price of
one dollar per copy, with earthquakes, fires, or shipwrecks, to
suit customers."

Amidst this confusion of tongues I take another survey of
my visitant.  Ha! a light dawns upon me.  That shrewd, old
face, with its sharp, winking eyes, is no stranger to me.  Pietro
Frugoni, I have seen thee before.  *Si, signor,* that face of
thine has looked at me over a dirty white neckcloth, with the
corners of that cunning mouth drawn downwards, and those
small eyes turned up in sanctimonious gravity, while thou wast
offering to a crowd of half-grown boys an extemporaneous
exhortation in the capacity of a travelling preacher.  Have I
not seen it peering out from under a blanket, as that of a poor
Penobscot Indian, who had lost the use of his hands while
trapping on the Madawaska?  Is it not the face of the forlorn
father of six small children, whom the "marcury doctors" had
"pisened" and crippled?  Did it not belong to that down-east
unfortunate who had been out to the "Genesee country"(1) and
got the "fevernnager," and whose hand shook so pitifully
when held out to receive my poor gift?  The same, under all
disguises,--Stephen Leathers, of Barrington,--him, and none
other!  Let me conjure him into his own likeness:--

(1) The *Genesee country* is the name by which the western
part of New York, bordering on Lakes Ontario and Erie, was
known, when, at the close of the last and beginning of this
century, it was to people on the Atlantic coast the Great West. 
In 1792 communication was opened by a road with the
Pennsylvania settlements, but the early settlers were almost all
from New England.

"Well, Stephen, what news from old Barrington?"

"Oh, well, I thought I knew ye," he answers, not the least
disconcerted.  "How do you do? and how's your folks?  All
well, I hope.  I took this 'ere paper, you see, to help a poor
furriner, who could n't make himself understood any more
than a wild goose.  I though I'd just start him for'ard a little. 
It seemed a marcy to do it."

Well and shiftily answered, thou ragged Proteus.  One cannot
be angry with such a fellow.  I will just inquire into the present
state of his Gospel mission and about the condition of his tribe
on the Penobscot; and it may be not amiss to congratulate him
on the success of the steam-doctors in sweating the "pisen" of
the regular faculty out of him.  But he evidently has no wish to
enter into idle conversation.  Intent upon his benevolent errand
he is already clattering down stairs.  Involuntarily I glance out
of the window just in season to catch a single glimpse of him
ere he is swallowed up in the mist.

He has gone; and, knave as he is, I can hardly help
exclaiming, "Luck go with him!"  He has broken in upon the
sombre train of my thoughts and called up before me pleasant
and grateful recollections.  The old farm-house nestling in its
valley; hills stretching off to the south and green meadows to
the east; the small stream which came noisily down its ravine,
washing the old garden-wall and softly lapping on fallen stones
and mossy roots of beeches and hemlocks; the tall sentinel
poplars at the gateway; the oak-forest, sweeping unbroken to
the northern horizon; the grass-grown carriage-path, with its
rude and crazy bridge,--the dear old landscape of my boyhood
lies outstretched before me like a daguerreotype from that
picture within, which I have borne with me in all my
wanderings.  I am a boy again, once more conscious of the
feeling, half terror, half exultation, with which I used to
announce the approach of this very vagabond and his "kindred
after the flesh."

The advent of wandering beggars, or "old stragglers," as we
were wont to call them, was an event of no ordinary interest in
the generally monotonous quietude of our farm-life.  Many of
them were well known; they had their periodical revolutions
and transits; we would calculate them like eclipses or new
moons.  Some were sturdy knaves, fat and saucy; and,
whenever they ascertained that the "men folks" were absent,
would order provisions and cider like men who expected to pay
for them, seating themselves at the hearth or table with the air
of Falstaff,--"Shall I not take mine ease in mine inn?"  Others,
poor, pale, patient, like Sterne's monk,(1) came creeping up to
the door, hat in hand, standing there in their gray wretchedness
with a look of heartbreak and forlornness which was never
without its effect on our juvenile sensibilities.  At times,

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