Thy love, can tongue declare? Cheered by thy smile, Peace dwells amid the storm; Held by thy hand, the floods assail in vain; With grief is blent a joy, And beams the vault of death. Passing, in one of my walks this autumn, the cave in which I used to spend in boyhood so many happy hours with Finlay, I found it smoking, as of old, with a huge fire, and occupied by a wilder and more careless party than even my truant schoolfellows. It had been discovered and appropriated by a band of gipsies, who, attracted by the soot-stains on its roof and sides, and concluding that it had been inhabited by the gipsies of other days, had without consulting factor or landlord, at once entered upon possession, as the proper successors of its former occupants. They were a savage party, with a good deal of the true gipsy blood in them, but not without mixture of a broken-down class of apparently British descent; and one of their women was purely Irish. From what I had previously heard about gipsies, I was not prepared for a mixture of this kind; but I found it pretty general, and ascertained that at least one of the ways in which it had taken place was exemplified by the case of the one Irish woman. Her gipsy husband had served as a soldier, and had married her when in the army. I have been always exceedingly curious to see man in his rude elements--to study him as the savage, whether among the degraded classes of our own country, or, as exhibited in the writings of travellers and voyagers, in his aboriginal state; and I now did not hesitate to visit the gipsies, and to spend not unfrequently an hour or two in their company. They at first seemed jealous of me as a spy; but finding me inoffensive, and that I did not bewray counsel, they came at length to recognise me as the "quiet, sickly lad," and to chatter as freely in my presence as in that of the other pitchers with ears, which they used to fabricate out of tin by the dozen and the score, and the manufacture of which, with the making of horn spoons, formed the main branch of business carried on in the cave. I saw in these visits curious glimpses of gipsy life. I could trust only to what I actually witnessed: what was told me could on no occasion be believed; for never were there lies more gross and monstrous than those of the gipsies; but even the lying formed of itself a peculiar trait. I have never heard lying elsewhere that set all probability so utterly at defiance--a consequence, in part, of their recklessly venturing, like unskilful authors, to expatiate in walks of invention over which their experience did not extend. On one occasion an old gipsy woman, after pronouncing my malady consumption, prescribed for me as an infallible remedy, raw parsley minced small and made up into balls with fresh butter; but seeing, I suppose, from my manner, that I lacked the necessary belief in her specific, she went on to say, that