A correspondent walking over the Surrey hills in April 1826 looked down from the Woodman inn on Norwood wood, still brown before the leaves came. He recalled it as the old haunt of the Gypsies, before the magistrates drove them away, and the pleasant hours he had spent there as a young man listening to their fortune-tellers. He added a little verse of his own remembering the dusky hands that had traced the lines of his palm in that quiet spot.
The fortune-tellers of Norwood
Printed under 27 April · Norwood, Surrey
No longer kept
the shadowy haunt of the gypsey tribe ere magisterial authority drove them away
From Hone's Every-Day Book, vol. 2, cols. 559-560. Read the original
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