instigated men to wear swords every day, and to take purses on horseback--when quadrupeds were preferred to steam, and sails were necessary to a ship--when Chatham and Blackstone appeared in the senate and at the bar, and Goldsmith, Johnson, and Burke, Cowper, Reynolds, Robertson Hume, and Smollett, were just beginning to cumber the highways of arts and sciences--at that period of the dark ages, the events which are about to be related undoubtedly took place, in a county which shall be nameless.

It may be that the reader would rather have the situation more precisely defined, in order, as he goes along, to fix each particular incident that this book may hereafter contain to the precise spot and person for which it was intended. Nevertheless, such disclosures must not be; in the first place, because the story, being totally and entirely a domestic one, depends little upon locality; and, in the next place, because greater liberties can be taken with people and things when their identity is left in doubt, than when it is clearly ascertained; for, although--

yet no one likes to have his name written upon his fool's cap, and handed down for the benefit of posterity, attached to such an ornament.

It was, then, on an evening in the early autumn, at that particular period of history which we have described, that two persons on horseback were seen riding through a part of the country, the aspect of which was one whereon we delight to dwell; that is to say, it was a purely English aspect. Now, this character is different from all others, yet subject to a thousand varieties; for although England, in its extent, contains more, and more beautiful scenes, of different kinds and sorts of the picturesque, than any other country under heaven, nevertheless there is an aspect in them all that proclaims them peculiarly English. It is not a sameness--far, far from it; but it is a harmony; and whether the view be of a mountain or a valley, a plain or a wood, a group of cottages by the side of a clear, still trout stream, or a country town cheering the upland, there is still to be seen in each a fresh green Englishness, which--like the peculiar tone of a great composer's mind, pervading all his music, from his requiem to his lightest air--gives character and identity to every object, and mingles our country, and all its sweet associations, with the individual scene.

The spot through which the travellers were riding, and which was a wide piece of forest ground, one might have supposed, from the nature of the scenery, to be as common to all lands as possible; but no such thing! and any one who gazed upon it required not to ask themselves in what part of the world they were. The road, which, though sandy, was smooth, neat, and well tended, came down the slope of a long hill, exposing its course to the eye for near a mile. There was a gentle rise on each side, covered with wood; but this rise, and its forest burden, did not advance within a hundred yards of the road on either hand, leaving between--except where it was interrupted by some old sand-pits--a space of open ground covered with short green turf, with here and there an ancient oak standing forward before the other trees, and spreading its branches to the way-side. To the right was a little rivulet gurgling along the deep bed it had worn for itself among the short grass, in its way towards a considerable river that flowed through the valley at about two miles' distance; and, on the left, the eye might range far amid the tall, separate trees--now, perhaps, lighting upon a stag at gaze, or a fallow deer tripping away over the dewy ground as light and gracefully as a lady in a ballroom--till sight became lost in the green shade and the dim wilderness of leaves and branches.

Amid the scattered oaks in advance of the wood, and nestled into the dry nooks of the sand-pits, appeared about half a dozen dirty brown shreds of canvass, none of which seemed larger than a dinner napkin, yet which--spread over hoops, cross sticks, and other contrivances--served as habitations to six or seven families of that wild and dingy race, whose existence and history is a phenomenon, not among the least strange of all the wonderful things that we pass by daily without investigation or inquiry. At the mouths of one or two of these little dwelling-places might be seen some gipsy women with their peculiar straw bonnets, red cloaks, and silk handkerchiefs; some withered, shrunk, and witch-like, bore evident the traces of long years of wandering exposure and vicissitude; while others, with the warm rose of health and youth glowing through the golden brown of their skins, and their dark gem-like eyes flashing undimmed by sorrow or infirmity, gave the beau idéal of a beautiful nation long passed away from thrones and dignities, and left but as the fragments of a wreck dashed to atoms by the waves of the past.

At one point, amid white wood ashes, and many an unlawful feather from the plundered cock and violated turkey, sparkled a fire and boiled a caldron; and, round about the ancient beldam who presided over the pot were placed in various easy attitudes several of the male members of the tribe--mostly covered with long loose great-coats, which bespoke the owners either changed or shrunk. A number of half-naked brats, engaged in many a sport, filled up the scene, and promised a sturdy and increasing race of rogues and vagabonds for after years.

Over the whole--wood, and road, and streamlet, and gipsy encampment--was pouring in full stream the purple light of evening, with the long shadows stretching across, and marking the distances all the way up the slope of the hill. Where an undulation of the ground, about half-way up the ascent, gave a wider space of light than ordinary, were seen, as we have before said, two strangers riding slowly down the road, whose appearance soon called the eyes of the gipsy fraternity upon their movements; for the laws in regard to vagabondism^[1] had lately been strained somewhat hard, especially in that part of the country, and the natural consequence was, that the gipsy and the beggar looked upon almost every human thing as an enemy.

With their usual quick perception, however, they soon gathered that the travellers were not of that cast from whom they had anything to fear; and indeed there was nothing of the swaggering bailiff or bullying constable in the aspect of either. The one was a man of about six-and-twenty years of age, with fine features, a slight but well-made person, and a brown but somewhat pale complexion. His eyes were remarkably fine, and his mouth and chin beautifully cut; he rode his horse, too, with skill and grace; and withal he had that air of consequence which is at any time worth the riband of the Bath. His companion was older, taller, stronger. In age he might be thirty-two or three, in height he was fully six feet, and seldom was there ever a form which excelled his in all those points where great strength is afforded without any appearance of clumsiness. He rode his horse, which was a powerful dark-brown gelding, as if half his life were spent on horseback; and as he came down the hill with the peculiar appearance of ease and power which great bodily strength and activity usually give, one might well have concluded that he was as fine-looking a man as one had ever beheld. But when he approached so as to allow his features to be seen, all one's prepossessions were dispelled, and one perceived that, notwithstanding this fine person, he was in some respects as ugly a man as it was possible to conceive.

Thanks to Jenner and vaccination, we (the English) are nowadays as handsome a people