these restless-footed people, whose origin no man is acquainted with, go forth again, and in the lanes and woods, or on the commons of the country, pass their summer, earning a precarious subsistance—honestly if they can—content with hard food and poor clothes, so that they may feel the free air of heaven blowing about them night and day, while the sun paints their cheeks the colour of the ancient Egyptians. Our Gipsies have always been a favourite study with ethnological folk; poets have sung their wild, free life, and painters have taken them as types of the happy, if the careless; while philanthropists have occasionally gone amongst them, and told pitiful tales of their degradation, ignorance, and misery. It was not from any feeling of romance or pity that we were induced the other day to accept an invitation from Mr. George Smith, of Coalville, to spend a few hours amongst some of these people. Mr. George Smith’s life has been devoted to the amelioration of the condition of many very poor and almost entirely neglected classes of the community, and it was pleasant to have the opportunity of going with such a simple-hearted hero amongst those in whom he takes a deep interest. Having devoted many years of his life to the poor brick-yard children, and afterwards to the children labouring in canal-boats, he has found one more class still left outside every Act of Parliament, and beyond every chance of being helped in the right way to earn an honest living and become industrious members of society. These are the Gipsies and their children, who have been let alone so severely by all so-called right-thinking men and women that there is great danger of their becoming a sore evil in our midst. Unable to read or write—their powers of thought thereby cramped—with no one to look after them, separated from the people in whose midst they live, there can be little wonder that they should grow up with certain loose notions about right and wrong, and a manner of life the reverse of that which prevails amongst Christian people; but, now that Mr. George Smith has got his eyes and his heart fixed upon them, there will surely be something done which, in the near future, will redeem these people from many of the disadvantages under which they labour, and add to the body corporate a tribe possessed of many amiable characteristics. Mr. Smith never takes up more than one thing at a time, and upon the accomplishment of it he concentrates all his energies. This attribute is the one which has enabled him to carry to successful conclusions the acts for the relief of the brick-yard and the canal-boat children; but while he is about a work he becomes thoroughly possessed by his subject, and the most important event that may happen for the country, or for the world, loses all value in his eyes unless it bears directly upon the accomplishment of the object in hand. Thus it happened that, from the time we sallied out together in search of