Weird Tales/Volume 2/Issue 4/Girl, Gypsy All Her Life, Turns from Wilds

Girl, Gypsy All Her Life, Turns from Wilds

Fresh from the gypsy world, slim yet sinewy, brown as a berry, with oval face and slender shapely nose, with firm lips and luminous brown eyes, and with hair glistening in two braids that hung to the waist, Rosalia Bimbo strode into a Chicago court and announced that she wished to see Assistant State's Attorney William J. Grace. She had fled from wild gypsy life because she was weary of lying, stealing and telling fortunes. As far back as she could remember, the gypsies with whom she had been forced to travel had craftily schooled her in the devious ways of petty crime.

Drilled in the profession of picking pockets and telling persons things that were not true, she finally summoned courage to flee from the endless round of dusty, dirty travel in the old Packard motor car in which a thirteen-numbered band ranged over the United States and even into foreign countries insidiously filching sustenance in any available field. Rosalia had been told she was born in Africa, and other things she was afraid were not true, and now appealed to William Grace to give her a chance to realize a dream to enter better ways.

The wish was granted; before night her cherished dream had been realized, she was able to sit before a white-clothed table, eat with silverware, sleep in a clean-linened, snowy bed and thus begin a life sought for in her eighteen years of yoked youth.