Then I felt a little better. Having ascended the hill, I put my horse into a sharp canter upon the common, and the cool air through which I swiftly passed refreshed me. The hollow in which the encampment had been was now deserted, and only the round bare spot amid the green, which is the gipsy autograph, announced that it had ever been there. Some miles further on, however, a little brown-legged boy, evidently of that wandering fraternity, suddenly emerged from a fir plantation, and stood before me in the road as if to beg. I was already feeling in my pocket for a penny, when, showing his white teeth in gratitude, he shook his head, and coming close to my stirrup, exclaimed, "You are the gentleman from Mr. Gerard's, sir, are you not? Would you please to come and see Granny Rachel?" In an instant, I remembered the pocket-flask, which I had entirely forgotten since the day in which it came into my possession; for all I knew, it was then lying yet in the drawing-room at the Dovecot. "Yes, my boy, that will I," returned I; "but I fear I have not brought her what she wants." He looked up in the bright interrogative manner peculiar to his tribe, so different to the stolid wonder of the agriculturist. "She wants <i>you</i>, sir, as I understood. This is the sixth day that she has set me to watch for you by this roadside. Will you please to follow me?" The boy started off at a pace which compelled me to move too fast for further questioning; and skirting the plantation for a hundred yards, stopped at the entrance of a roadway leading through the wood. The coming winter had not yet turned the broad green track to sand, and it ran so straight and far, that the pine trees seemed to stand on either side--a solid wall--with nothing but the blue heaven for their limit. This landscape of right lines would have delighted a painter of the Pre-Raphaelite school, it looked so stiff and unnatural; but pursuing the track for a little distance, and then plunging over a ditch and bank into the plantation itself, we suddenly came upon a scene which would have suited Morland. A low tent, with half-naked but merry children crawling in and out; a she-ass and her foal; a handsome male Epicurean, lying on his back, smoking a short, well-coloured pipe, the hue of which precisely resembled that of his own skin; a young girl in scarlet mantle, and with earrings of great splendour, gathering fir-cones to feed the flames which licked around an iron pot suspended on four sticks, piled musket-fashion; and an old crone, sitting by the same, and picking the feathers from a bird, which, had the time of year been beyond the end of September, I should have certainly taken for a hen-pheasant. But to suppose this, would have been to suppose an infraction of the game laws! The walnut-stained children stopped their play as I approached, and stood in various attitudes of wonder, like beauteous bronzes; the man turned over on his side, and opened his