A GIPSY BOY. 83 



leafy hill, with the blue water shimmering at our feet. 

 When shall we be there again ? ' 



When this letter reached Cromarty Hugh was in 

 Tain, but he evidently lost no time in replying to it on 

 his return. 



' Cromarty, July, 1835. 



' I need not tell you at this time of day how much 

 it is in your power to make me happy, and how 

 thoroughly my very existence seems to be bound up in 

 yours. I have but one solace in your absence, my 

 Lydia that one thought of your return. 



' There crossed with me in the ferry-boat a little 

 ragged gipsy boy, the most strongly marked by the 

 peculiar traits of his tribe I almost ever saw. Have 

 you ever observed the form of the true gipsy head ? I 

 am much mistaken if it be not the very type of that of 

 the Hindoo. In the line of the nose the forehead is 

 perfectly perpendicular, indicating, I should think, a 

 large development of comparison, but causality is less 

 marked, and the whole contour is one of little power. 

 It is not, however, the sort of head one would expect to 

 find on the shoulders of a savage, more especially of the 

 savage who can continue such in the midst of civilization. 

 On reaching the school-house I learned that John (Swan- 

 son) had resigned the school in consequence of an ap- 

 pointment to the mission at Fort William. I find that 

 in a pecuniary point of view he is to gain almost nothing 

 from the change. The salary does not exceed sixty 

 pounds a year, and he is to be furnished with neither 

 house nor garden. But it is to open to him a wider 

 field of usefulness, and to John that is motive enough. 

 He is, in the extreme meaning of the term, what Bona- 

 parte used to designate with so much contempt, an 

 ideologist, i. e. a foolish fellow who does good just be- 



