1826.] ■ [ 13 ,] 



AN (DLD gipsy: A VILLAGE SKETCH.* 



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 barnyards 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 primi- 

 tive : 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, ^nd a treadnnll in the next 

 town ; and therefore we go gipsyless — 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 har- 

 monizes 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, 

 donkies and dogs ; and sometimes a patch of bare earth, strewed with 

 ashes and surrounded by 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 de- 

 scription, 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 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, rendering 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 seldom-trodden 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 



