“No wonder that all the world—that is to say all our world—were crazy to have their fortunes told—to enjoy the pleasure of hearing from such undoubted authority that what they wished to be should be. Amongst the most eager to take a peep into futurity was our pretty maid Harriet; although her desire took the not unusual form of disclamation, ‘nothing should induce her to have her fortune told, nothing upon earth!’ ‘She never thought of the gipsy, not she!’ and to prove the fact she said so at least twenty times a day. Now Harriet’s fortune seemed told already; her destiny was fixed. She, the belle of the village, was engaged, as everybody knows, to our village beau Joel Brent; they were only waiting for a little more money to marry.... But Harriet, besides being a beauty, was a coquette, and her affections for her betrothed did not interfere with certain flirtations which came like Isabella ‘by the by,’ and occasionally cast a shadow of coolness between the lovers. There had probably been a little fracas in the present instance, for she [remarked] ‘that none but fools believed in gipsies; that Joel had had his fortune told and wanted to treat her to a prophecy, but she was not such a simpleton.’ “About half an hour after the delivery of this speech I happened, when tying up a chrysanthemum, to go to our wood yard for a stick of proper dimensions and there, enclosed between the faggot pile and the coal shed, stood the gipsy in the very act of palmistry, conning the lines of fate in Harriet’s hand.... She was listening too intently to see me, but the fortune-teller did, and stopped so suddenly that her attention was awakened and the intruder discovered. “Harriet at first meditated a denial. She called up a pretty unconcerned look, answered my silence (for I never spoke a word) by muttering something about ‘coals for the parlour,’ and catching up my new-painted green watering-pot instead of the coal-scuttle began filling it with all her might ... [while making] divers signs to the gipsy to decamp. The old sybil, however, budged not a foot, influenced probably by two reasons, one the hope of securing a customer in the new-comer, whose appearance is generally, I am afraid, the very reverse of dignified, rather merry than wise, the other a genuine fear of passing through the yard gate on the outside of which a much more imposing person, my greyhound Mayflower, who has a sort of beadle instinct anent drunkards and pilferers and disorderly persons of all sorts, stood barking most furiously. “... But the fair consulter of destiny, who had by this time recovered from the shame of her detection, extricated us from our dilemma by smuggling the old woman away through the house.