WHY SIR MASSINGBERD DID NOT MARRY. "I suppose you have heard, Peter Meredith, young as you are," began the old woman, "a great deal of ill-speaking against us Wanderers. We not only kill game, but even domestic poultry, if the opportunity is given to us; we not only steal wood, but horse-flesh; and since we are so partial to carrion, it is not to be wondered at that we sometimes suffocate a sheep with a piece of his own wool, in order to get the carcass cheap from the farmer. Yet whatever false charges are current about us now, these are nothing, either in gravity or number, to what they were when I was a young girl--that is, fifty years ago. Every man's hand, every woman's tongue, was against us: magistrates committed us without testimony; rogues made a trade of accusing us solely to get blood-money. Our name was more than a by-word, it was a brand; to call a man a gipsy, was to say vagabond and thief in one. Under these circumstances, Massingberd Heath left his father's house yonder, and came to live with us as congenial company. We were in this very wood the day he did so. The sun shone as brightly as now, the streamlet ran just as blithe, the air was filled, as now, with the sweet-smelling pine. The people only are changed--ah me, how changed!--who made up that scene. There was my father; he died! ten years younger than I am now; is not that strange, boy? his brother Morris, dead; poor Stanley Carew, you shall hear of him presently, a handsomer lad by far than his nephew there; my beautiful Sinnamenta, compared to little Mina yonder, though she is pretty enough, like a blush-rose to a mere peony, the flower of womankind. If there are ladies and women born into the world, then she was a lady. There are no such beauties now; no, friend, not even at the Dovecot. Let me see; I have counted four; then I was there also, comely enough, 'twas said, but not to be spoken of for looks with my younger sister.