language-there they camp in the fern, in the sun, their Eastern donkeys of Syria scattered round them, their children rolling about like foals in the grass, a bit out of the distant Orient under our Western oaks.

It is the nature of the oak to be still, it is the nature of the hawk to roam with the wind. The Anglo-Saxon laborer remains in his cottage generation after generation, ploughing the same fields; the express train may rush by, but he feels no wish to rush with it; he scarcely turns to look at it; all the note he takes is that it marks the time to "knock ott and ride the horses home. And if hard want at last forces him away, and he emigrates, he would as soon jog to the port in a wagon, a week on the road, as go by steam; as soon voyage in a sailing-ship as by the swift Cunarder. The swart gypsy, like the hawk, forever travels on, but, like the hawk, that seems to have no road, and yet returns to the same trees, so he, winding in circles of which we civilized people do not understand the map, comes, in his own times and seasons, home to the same waste spot, and cooks his savory bouillon by the same beech. They have camped here for so many years, that it is impossible to trace when they did not; it is wild still, like themselves. Nor has their nature changed any more than the nature of the trees.

The gypsy loves the crescent moon, the evening star, the clatter of the fernowl, the beetle's hum. He was born on the earth in the tent, and he has lived like a species of human wild animal ever since. Of his own free-will he will have nothing to do with rites or litanies; he may perhaps be married in a place of worship, to make it legal, that is all. At the end, were it not for the law, he would for choice be buried beneath the "fireplace" of their children's children. He will not dance to the pipe ecclesiastic, sound it who may-churchman, dissenter, priest, or laic. Like the trees, he is simply indifferent. All the great wave of teaching and text and tracts and missions and the produce of the printingpress has made no impression upon his race any more than upon the red-deer that roam in the forest behind his camp. The negroes have their fetich, every nation its idols; the gypsy alone has none

-not even a superstitious observance ; they have no idolatry of the Past, neither have they the exalted thought of the Present. It is very strange that it should be so at this the height of our civilization, and you might go many thousand miles and search from Africa to Australia before you would find another people without a Deity. That can only be seen under an English sky, under English oaks and beeches.

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Are they the oldest race on earth? and have they worn out all the gods? Have they worn out all the hopes and fears of the human heart in tens of thousands of years, and do they merely live, acquiescent to fate? For some have thought to trace in the older races apathy as with the Chinese, a religion of moral maxims and some few josshouse superstitions, which they themselves full well know to be naught, worshipping their ancestors, but with no vital living force, like that which drove Mohammed's bands to zealous fury, like that which sent our own Puritans over the sea in the Mayflower. No living faith. So old, so very, very old, older than the Chinese, older than the Copts of Egypt, older than the Aztecs; back to those dim Sanscrit times that seem like the clouds on the far horizon of human experience, where space and chaos begin to take shape, though but of vapor. So old, they went through civilization ten thousand years since; they have worn it all out, even hope in the future; they merely live acquiescent to fate, like the red-deer. The crescent moon, the evening star, the clatter of the fern-owl, the red embers of the wood-fire, the pungent smoke blown round about by the occasional puffs of wind, the shadowy trees, the sound of the horses cropping the grass, the night that steals on till the stubbles alone are light among the fields-the gypsy sleeps in his tent on mother-earth; it is, you see, primeval man with primeval nature. One thing he gains at least-an iron health, an untiring foot, women whose haunches bear any burden, children whose naked feet are not afraid of the dew.

By sharp contrast, the Anglo-Saxon laborer who lives in the cottage close by and works at the old timbered farmstead, is profoundly religious.

The gypsies return from their rambling

soon after the end of hop-picking, and hold a kind of informal fair on the village green with cockshies, swings, and all the clumsy games that extract money from clumsy hands. It is almost the only time of the year when the laboring people have any cash; their weekly wages are mortgaged beforehand; the hop-picking money comes in a lump, and they have something to spend. Hundreds of pounds are paid to meet the tally or account kept by the pickers, the old word tally still surviving, and this has to be charmed out of their pockets. Besides the gypsies' fair, the little shopkeepers in the villages send out circulars to the most outlying cottage announcing the annual sale at an immense sacrifice; anything to get the hop-pickers' cash; and the packmen come round, too, with jewelry and lace and finery. The village by the Forest has been haunted by the gypsies for a century; its population in the last thirty years has much increased, and it is very curious to observe how the gypsy element has impregnated the place. Not only are the names gypsy; the faces are gypsy; the black coarse hair, high cheek-bones, and peculiar forehead, linger; even many of the shopkeepers have a distinct trace, and others that do not show it so much, are known to be nevertheless related.

Until land became so valuable-it is now again declining these Forest grounds of heath and bracken were free to all comers, and great numbers of squatters built huts and enclosed pieces of land. They cleared away the gorse and heath and grubbed the fir-tree stumps, and found, after a while, that the apparently barren sand could grow a good sward. No one would think anything could flourish on such an arid sand, exposed at a great height on the open hill to the cutting winds. Contrary, however, to appearances, fair crops, and sometimes two crops of hay are yielded, and there is always a good bite for cattle. These squatters consequently came to keep cows, sometimes one and sometimes two-anticipating the three acres and a cow-and it is very odd to hear the women at the hoppicking telling each other they are going to churn to-night. They have, in fact, little dairies. Such are the better

class of squatters. But others there are who have shown no industry, half gypsies, who do anything but work-tramp, beg, or poach; sturdy fellows, stalking round with toy-brooms for sale, with all the blackguardism of both races. They keep just within the law; they do not steal or commit burglary; but decency, order, and society they set utterly at defiance. For instance, a gentleman pleased with the splendid view, built a large mansion in one spot, never noticing that the entrance was opposite a row of cottages, or rather thinking no evil of it. The result was that neither his wife nor visitors could go in or out without being grossly insulted, without rhyme or reason, merely for the sake of blackguardism. Now, the pure gypsy in his tent or the Anglo-Saxon laborer would not do this; it was the halfbreed. The original owner was driven from his premises; and they are said to have changed hands several times since from the same cause. All over the parish this half-breed element shows its presence by the extraordinary and unusual coarseness of manner. The true English rustic is always civil, however rough, and will not offend you with anything unspeakable, so that at first it is quite bewildering to meet with such behavior in the midst of green lanes. This is the explanation-the gypsy taint. Instead of the growing population obliterating the gypsy, the gypsy has saturated the English folk.

When people saw the red man driven from the prairies and backwoods of America, and whole States as large as Germany without a single Indian left, much was written on the extermination of the aborigines by the stronger Saxon. As the generations lengthen, the facts appear to wear another aspect. From the intermarriage of the lower orders with the Indian squaws, the Indian blood has got into the Saxon veins, and now the cry is that the red man is exterminating the Saxon, so greatly has he leavened the population. The typical Yankee face, as drawn in Punch, is indeed the red Indian profile with a white skin and a chimney-pot hat. Upon a small scale, the same thing has happened in this village by the Forest; the gypsy half-breed has stained the native blood. Perhaps races like the Jew and

gypsy, so often quoted as instances of the permanency of type, really owe that apparent fixidity to their power of mingling with other nations. They are kept alive as races by mixing; other wise, one of two things would happenthe Jew and the gypsy must have died out, or else have supplanted all the races of the globe. Had the Jews been so fixed a type, by this time their offspring would have been more numerous than the Chinese. The reverse, however, is the case; and therefore, we may suppose they must have become extinct, bad it not been for fresh supplies of Saxon, Teuton, Spanish, and Italian blood. It is in fact the intermarriages that have kept the falsely socalled pure races of these human parasites alive. The mixing is continually going on. The gypsies who still stay in their tents, however, look askance upon those who desert them for the roof. Two gypsy women, thorough-bred, came into a village shop and bought a variety of groceries, ending with a pound of biscuits and a Guy Fawkes' mask for a boy. They were clad in dirty jackets and hats, draggle-tails, unkempt and unwashed, with orange and red kerchiefs round their necks (the gypsy colors). Happening to look out of window, they saw a young servant-girl with

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a perambulator on the opposite side of the street;" she was tidy and decently dressed, looking after her mistress's children in civilized fashion; but they recognized her as a deserter from the tribe, and blazed with contempt. Don't she look a figure!" exclaimed these dirty creatures.

The short hours shorten, and the leafcrop is gathered to the great barn of the earth; the oaks alone, more tenacious, retain their leaves, that have now become a color like new leather. It is too brown for buff-it is more like fresh harness. The berries are red on the holly bushes and holly trees that grow, whole copses of them, on the forest slopes-" the Great Rough"-the halfwild sheep have polished the stems of these holly trees till they shine, by rubbing their fleeces against them. The farmers have been drying their damp wheat in the oasthouses over charcoal fires, and wages are lowered, and men discharged. Vast loads of brambles and thorns, dead firs, useless hop-poles and hopbines and gorse are drawn together for the great bonfire on the green. The 5th of November bonfires are still vital institutions, and from the top of the hill you may see them burning in all directions, as if an enemy had set fire to the hamlets.-Chambers's Journal.

MR. RIDER HAGGARD, in the course of the extraordinary new romance which he calls 'She'- -a romance for which we venture to predict a demand unprecedented even in these days of sensation-makes a suggestion which will set many minds thinking. It is that the moral nature tends to petrify with age, the heart gradually hardening with vast experience, till the man of abnormal age, say a thousand years, would be capable of performing any act, however cruel, if necessary to the execution of his will, and this the more readily if he were a wise man, and the will were consciously to himself a wise one. Lord Beaconsfield must have had the same notion floating in his brain when he made Sidonia say that "the heart" is in reality a liability to emotion which dis

appears as the horizon widens; and one wonders a little, as one reads, if the theory suggested is true. That it is apparently true in some cases is, of course, indisputable. Experience of itself hardens, not only, as in the case of the soldier or the surgeon, through the induration arising from custom, but through the accumulated wisdom which teaches us all the true limits of individual power, and the vastness and automatic severity of the forces with which mankind have to cope as best they may. Pain is so inevitable, that to those habituated to its contemplation it soon loses its dread aspect. 'Never mind about blood," we once heard an old surgeon say to a novice; "blood is a very showy thing. The old learn, as the young cannot learn, not to be miserable about

what they cannot help, not to mourn because there is poverty in the East End, not to shudder at hospital records, not to grow sick at tales of famine; for they know that they are powerless, and recognize with the American girl, that nothing is gained though they should cry all the time. Taught by innumerable facts, and influenced, too, by the tendency to resignation which experience produces even in non-Christiansevery year teaching you that Providence, or Fate, or Circumstance is, after all, not to be gainsaid they refrain from wasting force in purposeless screaming; and they seem, therefore, to those who would rather scream than do nothing, to have become hard. They are said not to be sympathetic, because they add nothing to the row. Indeed, in a way they are hard, caring less about what must be than the young, whose determination to find a preventive for the hail, excellent though it be as a stimulus to energy, springs at least as much from ignorance as from desire for the wellbeing of agricultural mankind. Moreover, the old grow hard about death. It ceases to be in their eves the greatest of misfortunes. They can sorrow intensely for individuals; but they cannot feel death as a producer of sympathy to the extent the young do, any more than veterans can grieve acutely for the loss of comrades who are but men like themselves, and whose risk they also ran. They are gone, and we must all go. The old realize death, are accustomed to death as to the revolution of the suns, catch some faint impress of its kindlier side, and cannot feel that new horror as at something which ought not to happen that is felt by the young. They give up hating the inevitable, and wrap themselves in a patience which is a sort of wisdom, though to the rightfully impatient it is so intolerably irritating. The old bear war, and the news of war, or of famine, pestilence, or flood, with a quietude which the young only imitate when they are by constitution callous. Some of this hardness, too, is perceptible in the moral region. The old do not, except in most exceptional cases, grow more wicked, as Mr. Haggard either thinks, or, with a cynical jocularity, affects to think; but they grow often more tolerant of wickedness, that is,

expect less from human nature in the mass than the young do. Saintliness being equal, it is the old confessor, not the young, who is the least exasperated by human error. He knows what human beings are, and knows, too, of the existence in them of compensations in character of which the young, much to their benefit, are necessarily unaware. But then, is the moral hardening real hardening, or only apparent ? We should say decidedly that while characters essentially rotten do frequently decay still further with age-a phenomenon often observed in the selfish or the weakly voluptuous-strong characters, if not poisoned by excessive power, or recurrent and, as they think, unjust misfortune, grow better in their later years. They grow more tolerant of all things, even if the things offend themselves, more affectionate in the self-denying sense of affection, more benevolent in their judgments altogether. They can pardon as the young cannot, and pardon wholly; and they are specially indisposed, instead of more disposed, as Mr. Haggard imagines, toward extreme violence. His heroine, two thousand years old, yet secure in beauty, might, as originally a pagan Greek, have so despised her barbarian rival that her life would have been nothing in her eyes, less than the life of a negro would have been to an angry Southern planter, or that of a dog to a vivisectionist; but if she had not felt that, which is a diseased form of pride, her only impulse would have been a tolerant, half-kindly scorn, which in an amiable person would have approached to pity for the weaker in a hopeless struggle. It is not the experienced who " blast" their foes or their human impediments, even when they can, and the class of murderers even by poison is not recruited from the aged. It is of universal experience that benevolence in its broadest sense is most conspicuous in men and women over sixty; and we should say that in the strong the most marked characteristic of age is a tendency to softness, arising no doubt in part from lost energy, but due in the main to experience itself. Whether the softening process would continue through æons, it is profitless to speculate, though Mr. Haggard is compelled to do it by his conditions; but we can

see no reason why it should not, or why that universal experience of mankind which induces them everywhere to depict the source of love as the Ancient of Days, should be pronounced off-hand to be contrary to evidence. It is difficult to find illustrations without impertinence, and those who are before the world are rarely the very old; but we doubt if any German would say that the oldest Monarch in Europe, trained though he was to pitilessness by tradition, by circumstance, and by profession, had hardened with the burden of his years. To foreigners, the German Emperor appears distinctly to have softened, and men say-it may be false, like most stories of living Kings-that it is he, and not Bismarck, who feels for the lot of the poorest, and urges ameliorations, not always wise. Who knows whether, two thousand years hence, he would not be a King living wholly for

his people, even though two thousand years should not teach him, what age certainly teaches few, that it is not through the exercise of authoritative power-we do not mean leadership, but power-but through abstinence from the exercise of it, that the individual usually benefits the many. Indeed, the contrary thought would be little less than a despairing thought, for it would involve the terrible hypothesis that wisdom and benevolence are mutually destructive. No one doubts that, the continuous completeness of the faculties and the opportunities being granted, wisdom grows with years; and if wisdom does not produce benevolence, what is wisdom worth? It may produce hardness, too, in some aspects; but then, of all the powers we know, Nature is the most steely-hearted, and the wisest do not doubt that it is hard with benevolent intent.-Spectator.

THOUGH the parent of our ownthough its spirit still informs us and its life-blood runs in our veins-the civilization of the Greeks is in many most important circumstances utterly unlike our own. Its virtues and its vices are alike alien to us; its beauty is not ours; its poetry appeals to but a chosen few; its deeds of heroism have no echo in our history; its heroes light no living fire of imitative enthusiasm in our youth; its religion has come to be a by-word of contempt; its gods are stricken with leprosy and smitten with shame; and our social habits are as different from those of the men who yet are our spiritual fathers, as our moral codes are irreconcilable. Much which they allowed as of the nature of men and things we for bid as infamous; what they considered essential to morals and good manners we have wiped off the tables altogether; and lapses which to them carried disgrace and left an indelible stigma, we in our turn treat as weaknesses of the flesh, to be dealt with leniently by all but Pharisees and Tartuffes. For human nature has everywhere the same trick of break

ing loose from the bonds of the forbidden; and it is only custom and climate which decide what is infamous and what is only regrettable-what may never be forgiven and what can without difficulty be pardoned.

Other things, too, have changed since Darius demanded earth and water from Amyntas, and his son vindicated the honor of the women by such bloody reprisals; since Leonidas died at Thermopyla, and Pericles rebuilt the Parthenon; since Socrates drank the cup of hemlock, and Etna cast back the golden sandal of Empedocles. Individualism, for one, has taken the place of that passionate devotion to the State which made mothers like Praxithea sacrifice their daughters to the gods; as modern mothers see theirs undertake the living death of a Sepolta Viva-with the same solemn sorrow for the lost love yet with the same grave submission to the divine will. But where our modern sacrifice is for the saving of our own souls, theirs was for the salvation of the State; and our daughters know as little of the patriotism which made Chthonia