The Gipsy Woman.

Waimate Daily Advertiser, Volume IV, Issue 270, 16 October 1902, Page 1

The Gipsy Woman.

Physically, the gipsy woman is not always handsome. As a maiden she is always attractive. With advancing age she may lose her roundness, her colour, her strange almost winginess ; but she never loses her glowing eyes, nor is she ever feeble or hesitant, in movement to her dying day, Gipsy women, as a rule, long outlive gipsy men ; and though I know a score of them past 90, I never saw one of these beldames who had not a vigor and elasticity far superior to those of your colonial woman at 30. Scrawny as she may become, she ever retains a seemingly exhaustless spirit, and a certain personal charm which, while almost undefinable, may perhaps be best suggested as that unconscious physical correctness of her own life, with which nature ever responds, and invariably logically bestows. What is true of one is true of all in this regard ; and the same universality of a kind of untrained but ever certain intuitive intellect ever bolds good. All things considered, I believe them inherently to be the brightest of women. Their judgment is unerring. They proceed to immediate results. They have a back door out of every dilficulty. Vixen, virago, and even hellion to the Gorgio or non-gipsy, she possesses all the virtues of wife,’ mother, friend, among her own; and in this startling contrast lies not only her chief interest as a human study, but her apparently wondrous power of sorcery and divination. In patience, loyalty, cheeriness, she is the peer of the noblest type of woman. In success she is never less thrifty, never less judicious and saving. In adversity she is boundless in resource. In sickness she is the nurse of all nurses. In good cheer she is the wine of the feast. Indeed, the gipsy wife and mother is a model for your pretentious women who are coming to regard the world endlessly their debtor because of their mere existence in it, and the entire social system as necessarily slavish to their whim. But to everything and everybody outside her own environment she wishes.to be known, and truly is, aboiu as much a witch as enlighumu And can conceive. ' that very si-immgand actuality all the supposed power of the gi] fortune-teller. All there is in t. power is just what, because you not so perfect a pretender in J line as she, open-mouthed, y believe to be.