A Journalist's Jottings Author:William Beatty-Kingston Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE GIPSY KING. There must be something intrinsically exhilarating in the position of a ruler over the Rommany, judging by the words of a song that attained c... more »onsiderable popularity in this country some thirty years ago, each verse of which concluded with the exultant burden, " For I am a Gipsy King, ha! ha!" It could not but be manifest to the dullest hearer of this joyous lay that the supposititious monarch for whom it was composed was moved to give vent to his inward contentment by outbursts of glad laughter, whenever he reflected upon the pleasures and privileges accruing to him from his rank in the larger Bohemia. To reign over this vast realm, with a jurisdiction extending to every country in Christendom and Paynimland, it was necessary that he should have been endowed by nature with a deep bass voice—the possession of which, from a lyrical point of view, implies a convivial spirit in its proprietor —as well as with indomitable cheerfulness of disposition and a marked tendency to rollick. The Gipsy King of the concert-room—he who brought abundant grist to the mill of the London music-seller, and was a steady source of income to the British basso profondo—levied alimentary taxes upon the squire's preserves and the farmer's hencoops, preferring the precarious rabbit and the incidental pullet to the uneventful steak and chop resulting from an ordinary commercial transaction. His palace was a covered donkey-cart by day and a light tent by night; his " pitch," a dry, sandy spot among the gorse and heather, selected—with an eye to the habits of the furred and feathered contributors to his larder—in convenient proximity to a broad turnip-field and a wide stretch of high covert. Among his subjects were swarthy youths, equally adroit in the tinkering of an infirm kettle, the twisti...« less