e
Barnaby Rudge's raven. He used to say he could "do nothin' at exhortin'
without a white handkercher on his neck and money in his pocket,"--a
fact going far to confirm the opinions of the Bishop of Exeter and the
Puseyites generally, that there can be no priest without tithes and
surplice.

These people have for several generations lived distinct from the great
mass of the community, like the gypsies of Europe, whom in many respects
they closely resemble. They have the same settled aversion to labor and
the same disposition to avail themselves of the fruits of the industry
of others. They love a wild, out-of-door life, sing songs, tell
fortunes, and have an instinctive hatred of "missionaries and cold
water." It has been said--I know not upon what grounds--that their
ancestors were indeed a veritable importation of English gypsyhood; but
if so, they have undoubtedly lost a good deal of the picturesque charm
of its unhoused and free condition. I very much fear that my friend
Mary Russell Mitford,--sweetest of England's rural painters,--who has a
poet's eye for the fine points in gypsy character, would scarcely
allow their claims to fraternity with her own vagrant friends, whose
camp-fires welcomed her to her new home at Swallowfield.(1)

(1) See in Miss Mitford's _Our Village._

"The proper study of mankind is man;" and, according to my view, no
phase of our common humanity is altogether unworthy of investigation.
Acting upon this belief two or three summers ago, when making, in
company with my sister, a little excursion into the hill-country of New
Hampshire, I turned my horse's head towards Barrington for the purpose
of seeing these semi-civilized strollers in their own home, and
returning, once for all, their numerous visits. Taking leave of our
hospitable cousins in old Lee with about as much solemnity as we may
suppose Major Laing(1) parted with his friends when he set out in search
of desert-girdled Timbuctoo, we drove several miles over a rough road,
passed the Devil's Den unmolested, crossed a fretful little streamlet
noisily working its way into a valley, where it turned a lonely,
half-ruinous mill, and, climbing a steep hill beyond, saw before us a
wide, sandy level, skirted on the west and north by low, scraggy hills,
and dotted here and there with dwarf pitch-pines. In the centre of this
desolate region were some twenty or thirty small dwellings, grouped
together as irregularly as a Hottentot kraal.