Gypsy moth

“ C. H. Fernald and E. H. Forbush, appears to be carrying on an effective campaign against the gypsy moth. The work was begun systematically in 1890, so that only the results of the first two season's operations have yet been embraced in the official report; yet, though the attempt was the first on a large scale ever made in the Commonwealth to destroy a species of insect, and the operators were without experience, a very perceptible reduction in the number of the insects and in the damage by them was realized ”

“ In ancient symbolism the horns of the moon were regarded as synonymous with the horns of the ox—hence their connection with agriculture, productiveness, and fertility, or the generative principle, and from this comes the beneficent influence not only of the horns, but of horse-shoes, boars’ tusks, crabs’ claws, and pieces of coral resembling them.
The great love of gypsy mothers for their children, says Wlislocki, induces their friends to seek remedies for the most trifling disorders. At a later period, mother and child are left to Mother Nature—or the vis medicatrix Naturæ. ”

“ Her voice was the lilting of a rain of silver waters,
And her lovers were as endless as her lands.
Down thro’ the birch wood with her maidens all about her,
So virginal she came with dainty tread,
At my eyes she was silent,—could a gypsy turn and flout her:
Love I looked and love I spoke, till white grew red.
Free she was as fair, she forgot her father’s palace,
Left her lands to wander at my side;
She is crowned with forest leaves, with my two curved hands for chalice:
Spring and love must bring a gypsy to his bride. ”

“ Not far from the fountain there lived a family of bricklayers. Now, fifteen years before this time, the father in walking through the forest found a little girl, who had been deserted by the gypsies. He carried her home to his wife, and the good woman was sorry for her, and brought her up with her own sons. As she grew older, the little gypsy became much more remarkable for strength and cunning than for sense or beauty. She had a low forehead, a flat nose, thick lips, coarse hair, and a skin not golden like that of Zizi, but the colour of clay. ”

“ Her face I could not see, but she wore a tattered shawl about her shoulders, and her black hair was done up in small plaits like a horse’s mane at fair-time. “Gypsy,” said I to myself, and, hastening alongside, I greeted her in the Romany tongue. The words had a magical effect. Instantly she wheeled round and scanned me up and down with a puzzled air. There before her, wearing an orthodox collar and black coat, stood a parson who nevertheless talked like a Gypsy. Now in common with some ladies of high degree, nearly all Gypsy women enjoy a whiff of tobacco smoke. ”

“ Much dust in the eyes, Thence may they become blind, Evil eyes now look on thee; May they soon extinguished be! May they burn, may they burn In the fire of God!"
Dr. WLISLOCKI remarks that the "seven ravens" are probably represented by the seven coals, while the three-pointed twig, the meal and the garlic, symbolize lightning. He does not observe that the stick may be the triçula or trident of Siva--whence probably the gipsy word trushul, a cross; but the connection is very obvious. It is remarkable that the gypsies assert that lightning leaves behind it a smell like that of garlic. ”

“ From a hillock by the hedge I have watched her seize a skittish pony by the mane and, leaping astride its back, gallop madly along a lane, to return a few moments later, breathless and dishevelled. This was her frolicsome mood.
Never very far below the surface of the Gypsy nature lurks a feeling of disdain, waxing fierce at times towards everything and everybody outside the Romany world. To this mood the Gypsy life appears to be the only life worth living, and the Gypsy is the only real man in the world. All other ways and all alien folk are suspect. ”

“ The gypsies believe that the Earth-fairies are the foes of every kind of worm and creeping insect with the exception of the snail, which they therefore call the “gráy Pçuvusengré,” the Pçuvus-horse. Gry-puvusengree would in English gypsy mean the earthy-horse. English gypsies, and the English peasantry, as well as gypsies, call snails “cattle, because they have horns.” Snails are a type of voluptuousness, because they are hermaphrodite, and exceedingly giving to sexual indulgence, so that as many as half a dozen may be found mutually giving and taking pleasure. ”

“ Bolton spoke well when he said that such reflection clothes these doggerels with a new and fascinating interest. Now and then some little thing awakens us to the days of old, the rosy, early morning of mankind, when the stars of magic were still twinkling in the sky, and the dreamer, hardly awake, still thought himself communing with God. So I was struck the other day when a gypsy, a deep and firm believer in the power of the amulet, and who had long sought, yet never found, his ideal, was deeply moved when I showed him the shell on which Nav, or the Name, was mystically inscribed by Nature. ”

“ To the heart of the gypsy there is a kindred voice in the cheerful crackle of a camp fire—in the wind that rustles tree and grass—in the song of a bird or the hum of bees—in the lap of a lake or the brilliant trail of a shooting star.
A winter forest of tracking snow is rife with messages of furry folk who prowl by night. Moon-checkered trees fling wavering banners of gypsy hieroglyphics upon the ground. ”

“ The Gypsy looks through the iron-grated door, and beholds, seated near the fountain, a richly dressed dame and two lovely delicate maidens; they are busied at their morning’s occupation, intertwining with their sharp needles the gold and silk on the tambour; several female attendants are seated behind. The Gypsy pulls the bell, when is heard the soft cry of ‘Quien es’; the door, unlocked by means of a string, recedes upon its hinges, when in walks the Gitana, the witch-wife of Multan, with a look such as the tiger-cat casts when she stealeth from her jungle into the plain. ”

“ And just as strange to them, in one sense, are the scenes in which these creatures dwell; for those who see in them only pictures, though they be by Claude and Turner, can never behold in them the fairy-land of childhood. Only in Ruysdael and Salvator Rosa and the great unconscious artists lurks the spell of the Romany, and this spell is unfelt by Mr. Cimabue Brown. The child and the gypsy have no words in which to express their sense of nature and its charm, but they have this sense, and there are very, very few who, acquiring culture, retain it. ”

“ The gypsy wildness in her needed colour, warmth, the speed of strange adventures; as a child, and later as a woman, she had peopled the heath with voices other than the curlew’s and the plover’s. The countless hollows, bottomed by rank mosses and deep bracken, hid ambushed men; behind each hillock that concealed the track from her, she would look for some figure to come riding down to meet her, and no toil about the farm, no harshness of the workaday life which hemmed her in at Ghyll, had killed this glamour of the heath. ”

“ You don’t feel nothing like so lonesome as you keeps pushing sticks into the fire and watching ’em burn away.” The words aptly express a Gypsy’s joy in a fire for its own sake, regardless of utilitarian considerations. At the moment there may be no kettle waiting to be boiled, no black stockpot demanding to be slung on the crooked kettle-prop, yet, for the pure pleasure of the thing, a Gypsy will light a small pile of dead sticks, and, lounging near, will gaze wistfully at the spiral of thin, sweet smoke upcurling between the trees in the lane. ”

“ The great soft shadows fell and faded on the mountains, and the air was sweet with the breath of a hundred fields where crimson clovers nodded in the sleepy wind. It seemed to Gypsy that she had never seen such mellow sunlight, or skies so pure and blue; that no birds ever sung such songs in the elm-trees, and never were butterflies so golden and brown and beautiful as those which fluttered drowsily over the tiny roadside clovers. ”

“ The moon is in many ways connected in gypsy faith with the hair. He who sleeps bare-headed in its light will lose his hair, or else it will become white. To have a heavy growth a man must scoop up with his left hand water from a running brook, against the current, and pour it on his head.
Immediately after the first bathing of a newly-born child, and its anointing, its forehead and neck are marked with a semicircle--perhaps meant to indicate the moon--made with a salve called barcali, intended to promote the growth of the hair. A brew, or mess, is made from beans and the blood of a cow. ”

“ Gypsies in England use the shears in incantations.
A whirlwind denotes that the devil is dancing with a witch, and he who approaches too near it may be carried off bodily to hell (as has indeed happened to many a wicked Pike in a cyclone or blizzard in Western America) , though he may escape by losing his cap.
It is very dangerous to point at a rainbow or an approaching thunderstorm. Probably the devil who here guides the whirlwind or directs the storm regards the act as impolite. He punishes those who thus indicate the rainbow by a gnawing disease. ”

“ In due course the Gypsy presented himself at my door in company with his two grandsons, and among them they carried three tables. I had only asked for one, but Jonathan was such a “find” that I gladly purchased all the articles and bade the little party follow me into the garden. The two grandsons displayed a remarkable knowledge of trees, which they were able to identify not merely by their foliage, but by the character of their bark. Wild birds they knew by note and flight as well as by plumage. There is so much a Gypsy boy knows about nature. ”

“ The Polish-Gypsy story of ‘The Witch’ (No. 50) , corresponds pretty closely; and for the roasted maize task compare the Roumanian-Gypsy story of ‘The Snake who became the King’s Son-in-law’ (No. 7) . For a multitude of non-Gypsy variants see Ralston’s ‘The Water-King and Vasilissa the Wise’ (pp. 120–133) , especially the Indian story at the end. Cf. also Cosquin, ii. 9, and i. 103, 106, 139, 141. The ring episode recurs in the Bohemian-Gypsy story, ‘The Three Dragons’ (No. 44, p. 154) . The fiery whip in the Gypsy story is, to the best of my knowledge, unique. ”

“ Younger than any of these children is the bewitching little gypsy, whose tangled curls frame a round, dimpled face, with rosebud mouth, and big black eyes looking bashfully askance. There is a peculiar charm in the child’s shyness, as if, like some wild creature of the woods, she would turn and flee before a nearer approach. ”

“ The huge trunks of the pines and maples towered up, up—they could scarcely see how far, grim, and gloomy and silent; here and there a dead branch thrust itself out against the sky, in that hideous likeness to a fleshless hand which night and darkness always lend to them. Even Gypsy, though she had been in the woods many times at night before, shuddered as she stood looking up. A queer thought came to her, of an old fable she had sometime read in Tom's mythology ”

“ A swart gypsy dropped a line into the river, a crane flapped across the sky, a fish leaped, flashing silver in the sun; the wonderbook of life was still to read; history and its ghosts must wait for old age and winter fireside.
It had rained for three days and nights, to the discomfort of flocks, herds, dealers, breeders, gypsies, and compradores. From Ronda and Utrera in the south, from Huelva in the west, from Aguilar, Lerida, from all over Andalusia, the animals were being driven in for the Feria, the great animal fair that follows the fiestas of Holy Week. ”

“ Sometimes he is constrained to think that the possessor of such a face has the mingled souls of saint and siren. The light undertone of melancholy which pervades gypsy beauty, gypsy music, gypsy manners, has an extremely remarkable fascination for all who perceive it. Even when it is almost buried beneath ignorance and animal craft, it is still to be found in the gypsy nature after diligent search. This strange race seems overshadowed by the sorrow of some haunting memory. Each individual belonging to the Tsiganes whom I saw impressed me as a fugitive from Fate. ”

“ WLISLOCKI, to the gypsy belief that there are white, black, and red Earth-fairies. A girl can win (illicit) love from a man by inducing him to carry a snail shell which she has had for some time about her person. To present a snail shell is to make a very direct but not very delicate declaration of love to any one. I have heard of a lady who caused an intense excitement in a village by collecting about a hundred large snails, gilding their shells, and then turning them loose in several gardens, where their discovery excited, as may be supposed, great excitement among the finders. ”

“ The telescope was popularised by Galileo, who, as mostly happens, carried off and still keeps amongst the vulgar all the honours of the invention.’ With the travelling robe compare the saddle in the Polish-Gypsy ‘Tale of a Girl who was sold to the Devil’ (No. 46) and the wings in the Bukowina-Gypsy ‘Winged Hero’ (No. 26) ; and with the apple of life, which occurs also in the Icelandic version of this story, the other-world apple in the Roumanian-Gypsy ‘Bad Mother’ (No. 8) . See also Clouston on ‘Prince Ahmad’ in his Variants of Sir R. F. Burton’s Supplemental Arabian Nights, pp. ”

“ The nettle has its own peculiar associations. According to the gypsies it grows chiefly in places where there is a subterranean passage to the dwellings of the Pçuvus, or Earth-fairies, therefore it is consecrated to them and called Kásta Pçuvasengré, Pcuvus-wood. Hence the gypsy children while gathering nettles for pigs sing ”