He is the founder of a most
populous school. The state of our population might now in some degree
be ascertained by the number of umbrellas.
_New Monthly Magazine._
* * * * *
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.
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