Romany Summer

GYPSY DOWN THE LANE--Thames Williamson--Small, Maynard (2.50). "The gypsy watches sky and earth, and both are lately swiftly changing. The heavens are day by day more tender, the air more soft--sweeter, my people. For a week the wind has ridden from the south, and with it the note of the bluebird, which is the note of springtime. . . ."

If that is not an exaggeratedly lyrical paraphrase of a gypsy chief's address to his people, then this may be a vividly naturalistic novel of gypsy life in the eastern U. S. It follows the devious fortunes of a band of Romanies from the break-up of their winter camp in New Hampshire to their arrival at a Vermont council ground in the autumn. In particular, it follows the wooing of pantherlike young Panna, the chief's daughter, by Milanko, the tumbler, and Yurka, the half-giorgio* fiddler; and reflects the changing of gypsy ways from mooching along in bright-painted horse-vans to flitting over the country in shiny automobiles. Whether or not some of the language is highflown--and whether or not gypsies ever caught chickens by dragging past a farmyard a fishhook baited with corn--the sharp flavor of true folklore is strong upon such sayings as these:

"A hungry belly has no ears."

"The sky still growls but his tooth is drawn."

"A clever cock crows from the egg."

"Weeping washes the heart."

"He who rides a tiger will have trouble dismounting."

And where else has it been recorded that, when a rat creeps into a bird's nest, their monstrous issue is a bat?

Author Williamson, only 32, has already been hobo, sailor, sheepherder, circus hand, newspaper reporter, wrestling instructor, prison official (finger prints), social worker, Harvard M. A., professor, translator, research ethnologist and author of a first novel (Run Sheep Run) that was universally hailed as "impressive, fascinating, vigorous, sinister, virile, etc., etc." He was born of mixed Welsh/-, French, Irish and Norwegian stock on an Indian reservation. The collection of novels he intends to write he calls "The American Panorama."

*Romanies call all folk not of their blood "giorgios."

/-His first name is pronounced Tha'-mes.