“Mr. Crabbe alludes at p. 29 of the ‘Gipsies’ Advocate,’ to a circumstance connected with gipsy burials, as having occurred in the neighbouring county of Wilts. I suspect it to be the same which was related to me two years ago, by the vicar of a parish in the New Forest, who had it from his intimate friend the curate of a Wiltshire parish, the name of which I forget. A small party of gipsies had remained stationary in the neighbourhood for an unusual length of time, detained by the illness of one of them, a very young woman and beautiful--lately married to a man as comely as herself. ‘One of the finest young men,’ the curate said, ‘he ever set eyes on.’ The woman died, and soon after the husband came, almost in a state of distraction, to apply for leave to bury her in the church. The permission could not be granted, though the man pleaded with passionate earnestness, saying, _any required sum_, however large, should be forthcoming, might he but lay her in the church. Finding that to be impossible, he bought a piece of ground in the churchyard, made a deep vault, where she was interred, and over it caused a monument to be erected, which was not only costly but in good taste, as was the simple record inscribed on it. This occurred several years ago, and not once has he omitted an annual visit to the grave since the day of his wife’s interment. “The magistrates, country gentlemen, and farmers, in the neighbourhood of Mr. Crabbe’s gipsy colony, complain bitterly of the effects of his benevolent scheme--affirming that it subjects them to the perpetual depredations of swarms of vagrants of all sorts, and that the good man himself is the dupe of nine-tenths of these persons, who allow him for a time to reckon them among his reformed gipsies. Be it as it may that this well meaning man is or is not imposed on, certain it is, that as a nation we are chargeable with culpable neglect towards these wild denizens. We ‘compass sea and land to make one proselyte,’ and at home, we suffer fellow beings to live and die among us, as unheeded and uncared for (far more so) as ‘the beasts that perish.’” We may illustrate this just remark of Mrs. Southey’s, and at the same time, the occasional scenes of wild life in England, by quoting from Mr. Crabbe’s volume the following extraordinary anecdote.