The gold and the spoons are all tied up--for, as the enchantress sagely observes, "there may be silver to"--and she solemnly repeats over it magical rhymes, while the children, standing around in awe, listen to every word. It is a good subject for a picture. Sometimes the windows are closed, and candles lighted--to add to the effect. The bundle is left or buried in a certain place. The next day the gypsy comes and sees how the charm is working. Could any one look under her cloak, he might find another bundle precisely resembling the one containing the treasure. She looks at the precious deposit, repeats her rhyme again solemnly and departs, after carefully charging the house-wife that the bundle must not be touched, looked at, or spoken of for three weeks. "Every word you tell about it, my deari, will be a guinea gone away." Sometimes she exacts an oath on the Bible, when she chivs o manzin apré laatti--that nothing shall be said. Back to the farmer's house never again. After three weeks another Extraordinary Instance of Gross Credulity appears in the country paper, and is perhaps repeated in a colossal London daily, with a reference to the absence of the schoolmaster. There is wailing and shame in the house--perhaps great suffering--for it may be that the savings of years, and bequeathed tankards, and marriage rings, and inherited jewellery, and mother's souvenirs have been swept away. The charm has worked. "How can people be such fools!" Yea--how can they? How can fully ninety-nine out of one hundred, and I fear me nine hundred and ninety-nine out of a thousand, be capable of what amounts to precisely the same thing--paying out their cash in the hopes that the Invisible Influences in the Inscrutable Cellar or Celestial Garret will pay it back to them, cent. per cent.? Oh, reader, if you be of middle age (for there are perhaps some young agnostics beginning to appear to whom the cap does not fit), and can swear on your hat that you never in your life have been taken in by a dudikabin in any form--send me your name and I will award you for an epitaph that glorious one given in the Nugæ Venales: "Hic jacet ille qui unus fuit inter mille!" The charm has worked. But the little sharp-eared children remember it, and sing it over, and the more meaningless it sounds in their ears, the more mysterious does it become. And they never talk about the bundle--which when opened was found to contain only stones, sticks, and rags--without repeating it. So it goes from mouth to mouth, until, all mutilated, it passes current for even worse nonsense than it was at first. It may be observed, however--and the remark will be fully substantiated by any one who knows the gypsy language--that there is a Romany turn to even the roughest corners of these rhymes. Kivi, stingli, stangli, are all gypsyish. But, as I have already intimated, this does not appear in any other nonsense verses of the kind. There is nothing of it in--