ries, and letting in a prospect of matchless | could have brought that Romeo and Juliet tobeauty. Fancy a winding woodland valley, gether. His honour related these exploits a rural bridge, a village, with its gothic with great complacency, whilst his wife did church, and a steep acclivity crowned with the not fail to remind him of the less fortunate exruins of a venerable castle, thrown together ertions of his talent;-how his influence gainwith a felicity of form and colouring, which ed poor Will the blacksmith his shrew, or Jem might beseem a landscape-painter's dream, the gardener his dawdle. But such accidents and you will have a faint idea of the view will befall the ablest diplomatists. The grand from that orchard. Under the yew hedge, object of his schemes at present was an union on a sunny bank thickly set with roses and between two individuals of his own househoneysuckles, and flowers and sweet herbs, hold. Mrs. Evelyn's personal attendant was were Mrs. Evelyn's pets, her only pets, the a stiff perpendicular old maid, bony and meabees. She was so fond of them, and visited gre in her person, with red hair, and somethem so often, that I used to wonder that she thing of a vinegar aspect,-for the rest a wellallowed them to be taken; but her love of intentioned woman, and a valuable servant. bees was balanced by her extraordinary pre- Mr. Evelyn had been looking out for a sweetdilection for honey; honey, especially when heart for this amiable damsel, (Mrs. Embleeaten in the comb, was, in her mind, a spe- ton by name) for the last ten years, and had cific for all diseases, an universal panacea, begun to despair of success, when all at once the true elixir vitæ. She imputed her own it occurred to him to strike up a match begood health entirely to this salutary regimen; tween her and his fat coachman, Samuel--a and was sure to trace every illness she heard round jolly old bachelor, blunt and bluff, with of, to some neglect of honey-eating. That a broad red face, a knowing grin, and a most she never could prevail on her husband to taste magnificent coachmanlike wig. He began in this natural balsam (as she was wont to call due form by rallying Mrs. Embleton on her it) must have been the great evil of her mat- conquest. Mrs. Embleton minced and simrimonial life. Every morning did she predict pered- -no objection in that quarter! Then death or disease to the sturdy recusant; and he consulted Mrs. Evelyn,-Mrs. Evelyn reevery morning was she answered by the same monstated; that, however, he knew by exkeen glance of the laughing hazel eye, and perience, might be overcome. Then he laughed the same arch nod of defiance. There he sat, at Samuel,-Samuel whistled ;-that was raa living witness that man might thrive with- ther dismaying. The next day he returned to out honey. It was really too provoking. the charge and again Samuel whistled,worse and worse! A third time his master attacked him, and a third did Samuel whistle. Any body but my godfather would have despaired. He, however, did not. At this point stood the game, when I left the north; and the very first letter I received from Mrs. Evelyn told me that the marriage was settled, the wedding-day fixed, and the bride-cake purchased. And the next brought tidings (for I still had my doubts of Samuel) that the ceremony was actually performed, and the happy knot tied; and Mrs. Evelyn seemed pacified, and the bridegroom resigned. No withstanding my dear godfather! Another point in dispute between them arose out of Mr. Evelyn's extraordinary addiction to match-making. He always insisted on calling marriage a happy ceremony, although one should think he had attended weddings enough to know that a funeral is generally lively in the comparison; and I am persuaded that dear as he held his genuine asbestos, a piece of bride-cake, drawn nine times through the ring, would for the time being have been held the greater treasure. Accordingly, he was the general confidant of all courtships of gentility within ten miles, and even, with all deference be it spoken, of some wooings, which had no gentility to boast; for his taste being known, and his abilities in that line duly appreciated, half the youths in the town came bowing to his honour to beg his good word. To his honour's good word and his own goodly person, did John Bell, head-waiter of the Greyhound, owe the felicity of calling the buxom widow Wilson, the rich landlady of that well-accustomed Inn, Mrs. Bell. To his honour's good word and a threatened loss of custom, was Robert Heron, the smart young linen-draper, indebted for the fair hand of Margaret Car, sole heiress of Archy Car, Scotchman, and barber, between whom and old Robert Heron a Capulet and Montagu feud, originating in a quarrel about their respective countries, had subsisted for a dozen years. Nothing short of my godfather's threatening to learn to shave, THE OLD GIPSY. We have few gipsies in our neighbourhood. In spite of our tempting green lanes, our woody dells and heathy commons, the rogues don't take to us. I am afraid that we are too civilized, too cautious; that our sheep-folds are too closely watched; our barn-yards too well guarded; our geese and ducks too fastly penned; our chickens too securely locked! up; our little pigs too safe in their sty; our game too scarce; our laundresses too careful. In short, we are too little primitive; we have a snug brood of vagabonds and poachers 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 genus the 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 Ŏctober morning had tempted me, could not well be imagined. 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 Branching off from the high road, a little years older, who lay basking in the sun, with below our village, runs a wide green lane, a couple of shabby dogs of the sort called bordered on either side by a row of young mongrel, in all the joy of idleness, whilst a oaks and beeches just within the hedge, form-grave patient donkey stood grazing hard-by. ing 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 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 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 re- About half an hour after the delivery of this plied, that she did not know to whom the dog speech, I happened, in tying up a chrysanthewould belong, but that the winner of the cup mum, to go to our wood-yard for a stick of would be a white greyhound, with one blue proper dimensions, and there, enclosed beear, and a spot on its side,- being an exact tween the fagot-pile and the coal-shed, stood description of Mr. George Davis's favourite the gipsy, in the very act of palmistry, conning Helen, who followed her master's steps like the lines of fate in Harriet's hand. Never his shadow, and was standing behind him at was a stronger contrast than that between the this very instant. This prediction gained our old withered sibyl, dark as an Egyptian, with gipsy half-a-crown; and master Welles-the bright laughing eyes, and an expression of thriving thrifty yeoman of the lea-she man-keen humour under all her affected solemnity, aged to win sixpence from his hard honest and our village beauty, tall, and plump, and 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 long- Harriet at first meditated a denial. She est coffin that ever was made in our wheel- called up a pretty innocent unconcerned look; wright's shop. A most tempting prediction! answered my silence (for I never spoke a word) ingeniously combining the prospect of win- by muttering something about "coals for the ning and of surviving the lady of his heart-parlour;" and catching up my new-painted a 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 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. 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 birdlime— and 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 glance. What a constable she would have made! What a jewel of a thief-taker! Pity that 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. and where should Joel get a white horse?" "Had this real young man made his appearance yet?" "No; there had not been a white horse past the place since Tuesday: so it must certainly be to-day." 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 unlucky enough 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! 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 IN one of the wild nooks of heath land, man, the real young man, whom she was to which are set so prettily amidst our richlymarry." Why, Harriet, you know poor timbered valleys, stands the cottage of Robert Joel." "Joel, indeed! the gipsy said that Ford, an industrious and substantial blackthe young man, the real young man, was to smith. There is a striking appearance of dinride up to the house drest in a dark great-coat gy comfort about the whole demesne, forming (and Joel never wore a great-coat in his life as it does a sort of detached and isolated terall the world knew that he wore smock-frocks ritory in the midst of the unenclosed common and jackets,) and mounted on a white horse-by which it is surrounded. The ample gar 66 LITTLE RACHEL. per swept hearth; and the little girl, if she ceived herself to be looked at, would slip behind the clock-case, or creep under the dresser 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 to avoid notice. Mrs. Ford, when questioned 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 harmony to the picture. 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 good and all; and vaunted much of her handiness, 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 school mistress. 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 only fault, and she believed the child could handsomest youths in the parish. Robert not help it. Her uncle and cousins were as Ford was proud of his boys, as well he might fond of her as could be, but she was afraid be, and Dinah was still prouder. 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." 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 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 |