3-046-978 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

An Autumn Ramble, 1872. 'It is really time for something to be done...to improve the education, of our young ladies, if they are so foolish as to consult the first gipsy fortune-teller they meet at a field stile...This is what comes of reading novels; for see that book which Miss Georgiana holds in her left hand, while she yields the right hand to be explored by the cunning professor of prophetic palmistry!...How is it that her father and mother have been satisfied with bad spelling and weak summing, a little miscellaneous catechism, the lists of Roman Emperors and English Kings, the fingering of maps and globes, a few scraps of French, German, or Italian, a tasteless trick of strumming on the pianoforte, and the abuse of pencils or water colours in her careless attempts at drawing? But she can also dance, mid she can play at croquet, and she can embroider in worsted, and she can "do crochet-work;" and she has read a great deal too much, and she has dreamt and sighed, or she has gossipped and flirted, and she never thought earnestly upon any question in her life! So here she is with a shilling for the gipsy, who meets her and her sister...at the verge of the common where the vagrant tribe of Romany Rye have pitched their savage encampment'. From "Illustrated London News", 1872.