of our own, to say nothing of their regular followers, constables and justices of the peace: -we have stocks in the village, and a treadmill in the next town; and therefore we go gipsy-less-a misfortune of which every landscape painter, and every lover of that living landscape, the country, can appreciate the extent. There is nothing under the sun that harmonizes so well with nature, especially in her woodland recesses, as that picturesque people, who are, so to say, the wild genusthe pheasants and roebucks of the human race. Sometimes, indeed, we used to see a gipsy procession passing along the common, like an eastern caravan, men, women, and children, donkeys and dogs; and sometimes a patch of bare earth, strewed with ashes and surrounded with scathed turf, on the broad green margin of some cross-road, would give token of a gipsy halt; but a regular gipsy encampment has always been so rare an event, that I was equally surprised and delighted to meet with one in the course of my walks last autumn, particularly as the party was of the most innocent description, quite free from those tall, dark, lean, Spanish-looking men, who, it must be confessed, with all my predilection for the caste, are rather startling to meet with when alone in an unfrequented path; and a path more solitary than that into which the beauty of a bright October morning had tempted me, could not well be imagined. Branching off from the high road, a little below our village, runs a wide green lane, bordered on either side by a row of young oaks and beeches just within the hedge, forming an avenue, in which, on a summer afternoon, you may see the squirrels disporting from tree to tree, whilst the rooks, their fellow denizens, are wheeling in noisy circles over their heads. The fields sink gently down on each side, so that, being the bottom of a natural winding valley, and crossed by many little rills and rivulets, the turf exhibits even in the driest summers an emerald verdure. Scarcely any one passes the end of that lane, without wishing to turn into it; but the way is in some sort dangerous and difficult for foot passengers, because the brooklets which intersect it are in many instances bridgeless, and in others bestridden by planks so decayed, that it were rashness to pass them; and the nature of the ground, treacherous and boggy, and in many places as unstable as water, renders it for carriages wholly impracticable. I however, who do not dislike a little difficulty where there is no absolute danger, and who am moreover almost as familiar with the one only safe track as the heifers who graze there, sometimes venture along this seldomtrodden path, which terminates, at the end of a mile and a half, in a spot of singular beauty. The hills become abrupt and woody, the cultivated enclosures cease, and the long narrow valley ends in a little green, bordered on one side by a fine old park, whose mossy paling, overhung with thorns and hollies, comes sweeping round it, to meet the rich coppices which clothe the opposite acclivity. Just under the high and irregular paling, shaded by the birches and sycamores of the park, and by the venerable,oaks which are scattered irregularly on the green, is a dark deep pool, whose broken banks, crowned with fern and wreathed with briar and bramble, have an air of wildness and grandeur that might have suited the pencil of Salvator Rosa. In this lonely place (for the mansion to which the park belongs has long been uninhabited) I first saw our gipsies. They had pitched their little tent under one of the oak trees, perhaps from a certain dim sense of natural beauty, which those who live with nature in the fields are seldom totally without; perhaps because the neighbourhood of the coppices, and of the deserted hall, was favourable to the acquisition of game, and of the little fuel which their hardy habits required. The party consisted only of fouran old crone, in a tattered red cloak and black bonnet, who was stooping over a kettle, of which the contents were probably as savoury as that of Meg Merrilies, renowned in story; a pretty black-eyed girl, at work under the trees; a sun-burnt urchin of eight or nine, collecting sticks and dead leaves to feed their out-of-door fire, and a slender lad two or three years older, who lay basking in the sun, with a couple of shabby dogs of the sort called mongrel, in all the joy of idleness, whilst a grave patient donkey stood grazing hard-by. It was a pretty picture, with its soft autumnal sky, its rich woodiness, its sunshine, its verdure, the light smoke curling from the fire, and the group disposed around it so harmless, poor outcasts! and so happy-a beautiful picture! I stood gazing on it till I was half ashamed to look longer, and came away half afraid that they would depart before I could see them again. This fear I soon found to be groundless. The old gipsy was a celebrated fortune-teller, and the post having been so long vacant, she could not have brought her talents to a better market. The whole village rang with the predictions of this modern Cassandra-unlike her Trojan predecessor, inasmuch as her prophecies were never of evil. I myself could not help admiring the real cleverness, the genuine gipsy tact with which she adapted her foretellings to the age, the habits, and the known desires and circumstances of her clients. To our little pet Lizzy, for instance, a damsel of seven, she predicted a fairing; to Ben Kirby, a youth of thirteen, head batter of the boys, a new cricket-ball; to Ben's sister Lucy, a girl some three years his senior, and just promoted to that ensign of womanhood a cap, she promised a pink topknot; whilst for Miss About half an hour after the delivery of this speech, I happened, in tying up a chrysanthemum, to go to our wood-yard for a stick of proper dimensions, and there, enclosed between the fagot-pile and the coal-shed, stood the gipsy, in the very act of palmistry, conning the lines of fate in Harriet's hand. Never was a stronger contrast than that between the old withered sibyl, dark as an Egyptian, with bright laughing eyes, and an expression of keen humour under all her affected solemnity, and our village beauty, tall, and plump, and fair, blooming as a rose, and simple as a dove. She was listening too intently to see me, but the fortune-teller did, and stopped so suddenly, that her attention was awakened and the intruder discovered. Sophia Matthews, our old-maidish school- verness and good humour generally contrived mistress, who would be heartily glad to be a to chase away. There had probably been a girl again, she foresaw one handsome hus- little fracas in the present instance, for at the band, and for the smart widow Simmons, two. end of one of her daily professions of unfaith These were the least of her triumphs. George in gipsies and their predictions, she added, Davis, the dashing young farmer of the hill-that none but fools did believe them; that house, a gay sportsman, who scoffed at for- Joel had had his fortune told, and wanted to tune-tellers and matrimony, consulted her as treat her to a prophecy-but she was not such to whose greyhound would win the courser's a simpleton." cup at the beacon meeting; to which she replied, that she did not know to whom the dog would belong, but that the winner of the cup would be a white greyhound, with one blue ear, and a spot on its side, being an exact description of Mr. George Davis's favourite Helen, who followed her master's steps like his shadow, and was standing behind him at this very instant. This prediction gained our gipsy half-a-crown; and master Welles-the thriving thrifty yeoman of the lea-she managed to win sixpence from his hard honest frugal hand, by a prophecy that his old brood mare, called Blackfoot, should bring forth twins; and Ned the blacksmith, who was known to court the tall nurse-maid at the mill -she got a shilling from Ned, simply by assuring him that his wife should have the longest coffin that ever was made in our wheelwright's shop. A most tempting prediction! ingeniously combining the prospect of winning and of surviving the lady of his hearta promise equally adapted to the hot and cold fits of that ague, called love; lightening the fetters of wedlock; uniting in a breath the bridegroom and the widower. Ned was the best pleased of all her customers, and enforced his suit with such vigour, that he and the fair giantess were asked in church the next Sunday, and married at the fortnight's end. No wonder that all the world- that is to say, all our world-were crazy to have their fortunes told to enjoy the pleasure of hearing from such undoubted authority, that what they wished to be, should be. Amongst the most eager to take a peep into futurity, was our pretty maid Harriet, although her desire took the not unusual form of disclamation,"nothing should induce her to have her fortune told, nothing upon earth!" "She never thought of the gipsy, not she!" and to prove the fact, she said so at least twenty times a day. Now Harriet's fortune seemed told already; her destiny was fixed. She, the belle of the village, was engaged, as every body knows, to our village beau, Joel Brent; they were only waiting for a little more money to marry; and as Joel was already head carter to our head farmer, and had some prospect of a bailiff's place, their union did not appear very distant. But Harriet, besides being a beauty, was a coquette, and her affection for her betrothed did not interfere with certain flirtations which came in like Isabella, "by-the-by," and occasionally cast a shadow of coolness between the lovers, which, however, Joel's cle Harriet at first meditated a denial. She called up a pretty innocent unconcerned look; answered my silence (for I never spoke a word) by muttering something about "coals for the parlour;" and catching up my new-painted green watering-pot, instead of the coal-scuttle, began filling it with all her might, to the unspeakable discomfiture of that useful utensil, on which the dingy dust stuck like birdlimeand of her own clean apron, which exhibited a curious interchange of black and green on a white ground. During the process of filling the watering-pot, Harriet made divers signs to the gipsy to decamp. The old sibyl, however, budged not a foot, influenced probably by two reasons, one, the hope of securing a customer in the new comer, whose appearance is generally, I am afraid, the very reverse of dignified, rather merry than wise; the other, a genuine fear of passing through the yard-gate, on the ontside of which a much more imposing person, my greyhound Mayflower, who has a sort of beadle instinct anent drunkards and pilferers, and disorderly persons of all sorts, stood barking most furiously. This instinct is one of May's remarkable qualities. Dogs are all, more or less, physiognomists, and commonly pretty determined aristocrats, fond of the fine and averse to the shabby, distinguishing with a nice accuracy, the master castes from the pariahs of the world. But May's power of perception is another matter, more, as it were, moral. She has no objection to honest rags; can away with dirt, or age, or ugliness, or any such accident, and, except just at home, makes no distinction between kitchen and parlour. Her intuition points entirely to the race of people commonly called suspicious, on whom she pounces at a ance yet?" "No; there had not been a white horse past the place since Tuesday: so it must certainly be to-day." glance. What a constable she would have and where should Joel get a white horse?" made! What a jewel of a thief-taker! Pity" Had this real young man made his appearthat those four feet should stand in the way of her preferment! she might have risen to be a Bow-street officer. As it is, we make the gift useful in a small way. In the matter of hiring and marketing, the whole village likes to consult May. Many a chap has stared when she has been whistled up to give her opinion as to his honesty; and many a pig bargain has gone off on her veto. Our neighbour, mine host of the Rose, used constantly to follow her judgment in the selection of his lodgers. His house was never so orderly as when under her government. At last he found out that she abhorred tipplers as well as thieves-indeed, she actually barked away three of his best customers; and he left off appealing to her sagacity, since which he has, at different times, lost three silver spoons and a leg of mutton. With every one else May is an oracle. Not only in the case of wayfarers and vagrants, but amongst our own people, her fancies are quite a touchstone. A certain hump-backed cobbler, for instance-May cannot abide him, and I don't think he has had so much as a job of heel-piecing to do since her dislike became public. She really took away his character. Longer than I have taken to relate Mayflower's accomplishments stood we, like the folks in the Critic, at a dead lock; May, who probably regarded the gipsy as a sort of rival, an interloper on her oracular domain, barking with the voice of a lioness-the gipsy trying to persuade me into having my fortune told and I endeavouring to prevail on May to let the gipsy pass. Both attempts were unsuccessful: and the fair consulter of destiny, who had by this time recovered from the shame of her detection, extricated us from our dilemma by smuggling the old woman away through the house. Of course Harriet was exposed to some raillery, and a good deal of questioning about her future fate, as to which she preserved an obstinate, but evidently satisfied silence. At the end of three days, however-my readers are, I hope, learned enough in gipsy lore to know that, unless kept secret for three entire days, no prediction can come true-at the end of three days, when all the family except herself had forgotten the story, our pretty soubrette, half bursting with the long retention, took the opportunity of lacing on my new half-boots to reveal the prophecy. "She was to see within the week, and this was Saturday, the young man, the real young man, whom she was to marry." Why, Harriet, you know poor Joel." "Joel, indeed! the gipsy said that the young man, the real young man, was to ride up to the house drest in a dark great-coat (and Joel never wore a great-coat in his lifeall the world knew that he wore smock-frocks and jackets,) and mounted on a white horse 66 A good look-out did Harriet keep for white horses during this fateful Saturday, and plenty did she see. It was the market-day at B., and team after team came by with one, two, and three white horses; cart after cart, and gig after gig, each with a white steed: Colonel M.'s carriage, with its prancing pair-but still no horseman. At length one appeared; but he had a great-coat whiter than the animal he rode; another, but he was old farmer Lewington, a married man; a third, but he was little Lord L., a school-boy, on his Arabian pony. Besides, they all passed the house and as the day wore on, Harriet began, alternately, to profess her old infidelity on the score of fortune-telling, and to let out certain apprehensions that if the gipsy did really possess the power of foreseeing events, and no such horseman arrived, she might possibly be unluckyenough to die an old maid—a fate for which, although the proper destiny of a coquette, our village beauty seemed to entertain a very decided aversion. At last, just at dusk, just as Harriet, making believe to close our casement shutters, was taking her last peep up the road, something white appeared in the distance coming leisurely down the hill. Was it really a horse?Was it not rather Titus Strong's cow driving home to milking? A minute or two dissipated that fear: it certainly was a horse, and as certainly it had a dark rider. Very slowly he descended the hill, pausing most provokingly at the end of the village, as if about to turn up the Vicarage-lane. He came on, however, and after another short stop at the Rose, rode full up to our little gate, and catching Harriet's hand as she was opening the wicket, displayed to the half-pleased, half-angry damsel, the smiling triumphant face of her own Joel Brent, equipped in a new great-coat, and mounted on his master's newly-purchased market nag. Oh, Joel! Joel! The gipsy! the gipsy! LITTLE RACHEL. IN one of the wild nooks of heath land, which are set so prettily amidst our richlytimbered valleys, stands the cottage of Robert Ford, an industrious and substantial blacksmith. There is a striking appearance of dingy comfort about the whole demesne, forming as it does a sort of detached and isolated territory in the midst of the unenclosed common by which it is surrounded. The ample gar swept hearth; and the little girl, if she perceived herself to be looked at, would slip behind the clock-case, or creep under the dresser to avoid notice. Mrs. Ford, when questioned as to her inmate, said that she was her husband's niece, the daughter of a younger brother, who had worked somewhere Londonway, and had died lately, leaving a widow with eleven children in distressed circumstances. She added, that having no girl of their own, they had taken little Rachel for den, whose thick dusky quickset hedge runs along the high-road; the snug cottage whose gable-end abuts on the causeway; the neat court which parts the house from the long low-browed shop and forge; and the stable, cart-shed, and piggeries behind, have all an air of rustic opulence: even the clear irregular pond, half covered with ducks and geese, that adjoins, and the old pollard oak, with a milestone leaning against it, that overhangs the dwelling, seem in accordance with its consequence and character, and give finish and har- good and all; and vaunted much of her handmony to the picture. iness, her sempstresship, and her scholarship, The inhabitants were also in excellent keep-how she could read a chapter with the parish ing. Robert Ford, a stout, hearty, middle- clerk, or make a shirt with the schoolmistress. aged man, sooty and grim as a collier, paced Hereupon she called her to display her work, backward and forward between the house and which was indeed extraordinary for so young the forge with the step of a man of substance, a needle-woman; and would fain have had -his very leather apron had an air of import- her exhibit her other accomplishment of readance; his wife Dinah, a merry comely wo-ing; but the poor little maid hung down her man, sat at the open door, in an amplitude of head, and blushed up to her white temples, cap and gown and handkerchief, darning an and almost cried, and though too frightened to eternal worsted stocking, and hailed the pass-run away, shrank back till she was fairly hiders-by with the cheerful freedom of one well den behind her portly aunt; so that that perto do in the world and their three sons, well-formance was perforce pretermitted. - Mrs. grown lads from sixteen to twenty, were the Ford was rather scandalized at this shyness; pride of the village for industry and good-hu- and expostulated, coaxed and scolded, after mour-to say nothing of their hereditary love the customary fashion on such occasions.of cricket. On a Sunday, when they had on" Shame-facedness was," she said, "Rachel's their best and cleanest faces, they were the handsomest youths in the parish. Robert Ford was proud of his boys, as well he might be, and Dinah was still prouder. Altogether it was a happy family and a pretty scene; especially of an evening, when the forge was at work, and when the bright firelight shone through the large unglazed window, illumining with its strange red unearthly light, the group that stood round the anvil; showers of sparks flying from the heated iron, and the loud strokes of the sledgehammer resounding over all the talking and laughing of the workmen, reinforced by three or four idlers who were lounging about the shop. It formed a picture, which in a summer evening, we could seldom pass without stopping to contemplate; besides, I had a road-side acquaintance with Mrs. Ford, had taken shelter in her cottage from thunderstorms and snow-storms, and even by daylight could not walk by without a friendly "How d'ye do." Late in last autumn we observed an addition to the family, in the person of a pretty little shy lass, of some eight years old, a fair slim small-boned child, with delicate features, large blue eyes, a soft colour, light shining hair, and a remarkable neatness in her whole appearance. She seemed constantly busy, either sitting on a low stool by Dinah's side at needle-work, or gliding about the kitchen engaged in some household employment-for the wide open door generally favoured the passengers with a full view of the interior, from the fully-stored bacon-rack to the nicely only fault, and she believed the child could not help it. Her uncle and cousins were as fond of her as could be, but she was afraid of them all, and never had entered the shop since there she had been. Rachel," she added, "was singular in all her ways, and never spent a farthing on apples or ginger-bread, though she had a bran-new sixpence, which her uncle had given her for hemming his cravats; she believed that she was saving it to send home." A month passed away, during which time, from the mere habit of seeing us frequently, Rachel became so far tamed as to behold me and my usual walking companion without much dismay; would drop her little curtsy without colouring so very deeply, and was even won to accept a bun from that dear companion's pocket, and to answer yes or no to his questions. At the end of that period, as we were returning home in the twilight from a round of morning visits, we perceived a sort of confusion in the forge, and heard loud sounds of scolding from within the shop, mixed with bitter lamentations from without. On a nearer approach, we discovered that the object in distress, was an old acquaintance; a young Italian boy, such a wanderer from the Lake of Como, as he, whom Wordsworth has addressed so beautifully: -"Or on thy head to poise a show Around his placid temples curled, And Shakspeare at his sidea freight, He passed us almost every day, carrying his tray full of images into every quarter of the village. We had often wondered how he could find vent for his commodities; but our farmers' wives patronize that branch of art; and Stefano, with his light firm step, his upright carriage, his dancing eyes, and his broken English, was an universal favourite. At present the poor boy's keen Italian features and bright dark eyes were disfigured by crying; and his loud wailings and southern gesticulations bore witness to the extremity of his distress. The cause of his grief was visible in the half-empty tray that rested on the window of the forge, and the green parrot which lay in fragments on the footpath. The wrath of Robert Ford required some further explanation, which the presence of his worship instantly brought forth, although the enraged blacksmith was almost too angry to speak intelligibly. inquiries as to the amount of his loss, with which he was assailed; and young William Ford, "a lad of grace," was approaching his, hand to his pocket, and my dear companion had just drawn forth his purse, when the good intentions of the one were arrested by the stern commands of his father, and the other was stopped by the re-appearance of Rachel, ! who had run back to the house, and now darted through the group holding out her own new sixpence, her hoarded sixpence, and put it into Stefano's hand! It may be imagined that the dear child was no loser by her generosity; she was loaded, with caresses by every one, which, too much, excited to feel her bashfulness, she not only endured but returned. Her uncle, thus rebuked by an infant, was touched almost to tears. He folded her in his arms, kissed her and blessed her; gave Stefano half a crown for the precious sixpence, and swore to keep it as a relique and a lesson as long as he lived. EARLY RECOLLECTIONS. I HAVE said that my dear godfather was a great match-maker. Öne of his exploits in this way, which occurred during my second visit to him and Mrs. Evelyn, I am now about to relate. It appeared that this youngster and favourite son, William, had been chaffering with Stefano for this identical green parrot, to present to Rachel, when a mischievous lad, running along the road, had knocked it from the window-sill, and reduced it to the state which we saw. So far was mere misfortune; and undoubtedly if left to himself, our good neighbour would have indemnified the little merchant; but poor Stefano, startled at the suddenness of the accident, trembling at the Amongst the many distant cousins to whom anger of the severe master on whose account I was introduced in that northern region, was he travelled the country, and probably in the a young kinswoman by the name of Hervey darkness really mistaking the offender, un--an orphan heiress of considerable fortune, luckily accused William Ford of the overthrow; which accusation, although the assertion was instantly and humbly retracted on William's denial, so aroused the English blood of the father, a complete John Bull, that he was raving, till black in the face, against cheats and foreigners, and threatening the young Italian with whipping, and the treadmill, and justices, and stocks, when we made our appearance, and the storm, having nearly exhausted its fury, gradually abated. who lived in the same town and the same street with my godfather, under the protection of a lady who had been the governess of her childhood, and continued with her as the friend of her youth. Sooth to say, their friendship was of that tender and sentimental sort at, which the world, the wicked world, is so naughty as to laugh. Miss Reid and Miss Hervey were names quite as inseparable as goose and apple-sauce, or tongue and chicken. They regularly made their appearance together, and there would have appeared I know not what of impropriety in speaking of either singly; it would have looked like a teang asunder of the "double cherry," respecting which, in their case, even the seeming parted,” would have been held too disjunctive a phrase, so tender and inseparable was their union; although as far as resemblance went,¦ no simile could be more inapplicable. Never were two people more unlike in mid and person. By this time, however, the clamour had attracted a little crowd of lookers-on from the house and the road, amongst the rest Mrs. Ford, and, peeping behind her aunt, little Rachel. Stefano continued to exclaim in his imperfect accent “ He will beat me!" and to sob and crouch and shiver, as if actually suffering under the impending chastisement. It was impossible not to sympathise with such a reality of distress, although we felt that an English boy, similarly situated, would have been too stout-hearted not to restrain its ex-, Lucy Hervey was a pretty little woman of ; pression. "Six-pence!" and "my master six and twenty; but from a delicate figure," will beat me!" intermixed with fresh bursts delicate features, and a most delicate comof crying, were all his answers to the various plexion, looking much younger. Perhaps the |