Page:Triangles of life, and other stories.djvu/59

 made that most original and world-famous proposal of his.

The memories of old Paddy's Market and Paddy's Market Square of twenty years ago will give old Sydneyites a very good idea of the real thing.

Some gipsy caravans are models in woodwork, with polished brasswork inside, and fitted like a ship's cabin. But most of the travelling ones are rough and dirty enough. I shall always remember the gipsies as hurrying on, camping at a fire left by a caravan ahead, probably, for a few minutes it seemed, and hurrying on. Caravan hurrying on after caravan, and gipsies on foot hurrying on after gipsies on foot, talking their own "outlandish," and calling to each other. Running in and out of line to the beerhouse (generally in a pocket of the hedges out of sight of the road till you see it), and hurrying out and on again. But they camped, sometimes by Charlton, where, as in most other places, they were outcast and unappreciated, and were hurried on as soon as possible. Between Charlton and its Four Lanes was a triangular piece of ground, hedged in and known as the "Three Corner Medder," or "Three Corner Loosen," or something, and this the Gipsies sometimes hired from Leonard as a camp for themselves and horses. It was a perfect triangle, and the side lanes, both went to church and the post office, or rather to a stile and a path that ran across a sort of waste or common to the church or the post office, which latter seemed a pretty vine-covered, flower-fronted English village-drama cottage and nothing else.