New Monthly Magazine.

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GIPSIES.

Gipsies in times of yore were the scape-goats of the peasantry:  if “cock” were “purloined” or any other rural mischief done by night, it was immediately fathered upon a neighbouring tent of “the dark race.”  No further evidence was required than the pot boiling on stick transverse:  no one hesitated to conclude that the said pot contained the corpus delicti:  that the individual missing cock was there parboiling, and that the swarthy race lolling around the fire, or peeping from beneath the canvass roof, were resting from the unholy labours of the night.  Crime, however, has made such rapid marches that it has long been seen that the gipsies could not perpetrate the whole of it:  and now it is pretty clear they are, and probably have always been, innocent of the whole of it.  It is an event of extreme rarity to see a gipsy in a court of justice, and we have reason to believe that it has come to pass that farmers entertain a belief that the tent of the wanderer, with its nightly blaze and its dark shadows flitting about it, is a protection to their property.  There is every probability in favour of the justice of this character.  The life of the gipsy is not unlucrative:  his wants are few and coarse, and the calls upon him are scarcely any.  He pays no rent:  he is exempt from taxes:  he spends nothing in the luxury of attire:  no man can bring him in a bill.  Being himself a mender and universal repairer, he is under the necessity of demanding no man’s aid.  His horse or his ass feeds on Nature’s common, the hedge-side, the waste corner, the forest thicket, well known and long haunted by him and his tribe.  Gipsies are subject to few diseases:  they seldom ask the doctor’s assistance but for one friendly office, and that serves a man his lifetime.  The open air, the inconstancy of their labour, the sufficiency of their food, and the quantity of healthy exercise, necessarily render these Arabs of civilization the healthiest part of the people.  As the monks of old always managed to select a happy site for their establishments, so does the gipsy always contrive to fix upon a pleasant and healthy spot for the pitching of his tent.  It is sure to be near a brook for the supply of fresh water for the pot, and a washing-place for the family rags:  it generally lies under the shelter of some umbrageous tree, it will always be found to have a view of the road, and invariably placed on the edge of some nice short and sweet morsel of grass for the recreation of the quadrupeds of the party.