they despised more than the gipsies, who lived in the forest all about.

"There was no place in all England then so full of gipsies as the
forest of Norwood.

"Mr. and Mrs. Lawley had been married many years, and had no children;
at length they had one son--they called him Edwy, and they felt they
could not make too much of him, or dress him too fine.

"When he was just old enough to run about without help, he used to wear
his trousers inlaid with the finest lace, with golden studs and laced
robings; he had a plume of feathers in his cap, which was of velvet,
with a button of gold to fasten it up in front under the feathers, so
that whoever saw him with the servants who attended him, used to say,
'Whose child is that?'

"He was a pretty boy, too, and, when his first sorrow came, was still
too young to have learned any of the proud ways of his father and
mother.

"No one is so rich as to be above the reach of trouble, therefore pride
and self-sufficiency are never suitable to the state of man.

"Trouble was long in coming to Mr. and Mrs. Lawley, but when it came it
was only the more terrible.

"One day, when the proud parents had been absent some hours on a visit
to a friend a few miles distant, Edwy was nowhere to be found on their
return--his waiting-maid was gone, and had taken away his finest
clothes; at least, these were also missing.

"The poor father and mother were almost beside themselves with grief,
and all the gentlemen and magistrates about rose up together to find
the child, and discover those who had stolen him, but all in vain; of
course, the gipsies were suspected and well examined, but nothing could
be made of it; nor was it ever made out in what way the little boy was
got off; but got off he had been by the gipsies, and carried away to a
country among hills, on the borders of the two shires of Worcester and
Hereford."

"Did not I know it?" cried Henry, as he stopped to turn over a leaf; "I
knew it from the first that the gipsies had him."

"In that country," he continued, as he read on, "there is a valley
where two watercourses meet deep in a bottom; where there are many
trees, and many bushes, and much broken irregular ground, where also
there are rocks, and caves, and holes in these rocks, and every
possible convenience for the haunt of wild people. To this place the
gipsies carried the little boy, and there they kept him, all the
following winter, warm in a hut with some of their own ch