No. 36.--Happy Boz’ll

Gypsy Folk Tales, by Francis Hindes Groome, [1899], at sacred-texts.com

No. 36.--Happy Boz’ll

Wonst upon a time there was a Romano, and his name was Happy Boz’ll, and he had a German-silver grinding-barrow, and he used to put his wife and his child on the top,

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and he used to go that quick along the road he 'd beat all the coaches. Then he thought this grinding-barrow was too heavy and clumsy to take about, and he cut it up and made tent-rods of it. And then his donkey got away, and he didn't know where it was gone to; and one day he was going by the tent, and he said to himself, 'Bless my soul, wherever's that donkey got to?' And there was a tree close by, and the donkey shouted out and said, 'I'm here, my Happy, getting you a bit o’ stick to make a fire.' Well, the donkey come down with a lot of sticks, and he had been up the tree a week, getting firewood. Well then, Happy had a dog, and he went out one day, the dog one side the hedge, and him the other. And then he saw two hares. The dog ran after the two; and as he was going across the field, he cut himself right through with a scythe; and then one half ran after one hare, and the other after the other. Then the two halves of the dog catched the two hares; and then the dog smacked together again; and he said, 'Well, I've got ’em, my Happy'; and then the dog died. And Happy had a hole in the knee of his breeches, and he cut a piece of the dog's skin, after it was dead, and sewed it in the knee of his breeches. And that day twelve months his breeches-knee burst open, and barked at him. And so that's the end of Happy Boz’ll.

Also Münchausen-like; but I believe it was largely this story, which I printed on p. 160 of my In Gypsy Tents, that led the great Lazarus Petulengro to remark once to Mr. Sampson, 'Isn't it wonderful, sir, that a real gentleman could have wrote such a thing--nothing but low language and povertiness, and not a word of grammar or high-learned talk in it from beginning to end.'

We have a third Gypsy lying story, a Welsh-Gypsy one. Matthew Wood's father had, like a good many Gypsies, a contempt for folk-tales, and, when called on for his turn, he always gave this, the very shortest one;--'There were a naked man and a blind man and a lame man. The blind man saw a hare, and the lame man ran and caught it, and the naked man put it in his pocket.' Cf. Grimm's No. 159, 'The Ditmarsch Tale of Wonders' (ii. 230, 452). Indian lying stories occur in Maive Stokes's Indian Fairy Tales, Nos. 4, 8, 17.