Dabbling in sorcery is in some degree the province of the female Gypsy. She affects to tell the future, and to prepare philters, by means of which love can be awakened in any individual towards any particular object; and such is the credulity of the human race, even in the most enlightened countries, that the profits arising from these practices are great. The following is a case in point: Two females, neighbors and friends, were tried, some years since, for the murder of their husbands. It appeared that they were in love for the same individual, and had conjointly, at various times, paid sums of money to a Gypsy woman to work charms to captivate his affections. Whatever little effect the charms might produce, they were successful in their principal object, for the person in question carried on for some time a criminal intercourse with both. The matter came to the knowledge of the husbands, who, taking means to break off this connection, were both poisoned by their wives. Till the moment of conviction, these wretched females betrayed neither emotion nor fear; but at this juncture their consternation was indescribable. They afterwards confessed that the Gypsy, who had visited them in prison, had promised to shield them from conviction by means of her art. It is therefore not surprising that in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when a belief in sorcery was supported by the laws of all Europe, these people were regarded as practisers of sorcery, and punished as such, when, even in the nineteenth, they still find people weak enough to place confidence in their claims to supernatural power. In telling fortunes, the first demand of the Gypsy, in England, is invariably a sixpence, in order that she may cross her hands with silver; and here the same promises are made, and as easily believed, as in other countries, leading to the conclusion that mental illumination, amongst the generality of mankind, has made no progress whatever; as we observe in the nineteenth century the same gross credulity manifested as in the seventeenth, and the inhabitants of one of the countries most celebrated for the arts of civilization imposed upon by the same stale tricks which served to deceive, two centuries before, in Spain, a country whose name has long and justly been considered as synonymous with every species of ignorance and barbarity.