roy inexpressibles, they had learned to distinguish as "Billy Breeches." The giant, who carried a bag-pipe, had broken down ere I came up with them; and now, sitting on the grass, he was droning out in fitful blasts a diabolical music, to which Billy Breeches was dancing; but, just as I passed, Billy also gave way, after wasting an infinity of exertion in keeping erect; and, falling over the prostrate musician, I could hear the bag groaning out its soul as he pressed against it, in a lengthened melancholious squeal. I found the cave bearing an aspect of more than ordinary picturesqueness. It had its two fires, and its double portion of smoke, that went rolling out in the calm like an inverted river; for it clung close to the roof, as if by a reversed gravitation, and turned its foaming surface lownwards. At the one fire an old gipsy woman was engaged in baking oaten cakes; and a great pot, that dispensed through the cave the savory odor of unlucky poultry cut short in the middle of their days, and of hapless hares destroyed without the game license, depended over the other. An ass, the common property of the tribe, stood meditating in the fore-ground; two urchins, of about from ten to twelve years a-piece,— wretchedly supplied in the article of clothing, for the one, provided with only a pair of tattered trousers, was naked from the waist upwards, and the other, furnished with only a dilapidated jacket, was naked from the waist downwards,—were engaged in picking up fuel for the fire, still further in front; a few of the ordinary inmates of the place lounged under cover of the smoke, apparently in a mood not in the least busy; and on a couch of dried fern sat evidently the central figure of the group, a young, sparkling-eyed brunette, more than ordinarily marked by the Hindu peculiarities of head and feature, and attended by a savage-looking fellow of about twenty, dark as a mulatto, and with a profusion of long flexible hair, black as jet, hanging down to his eyes, and clustering about his cheeks and neck. These were, I ascertained, the bride and bridegroom. The bride was engaged in sewing a cap,—the bridegroom in watching the progress of the work. I observed that the party, who were less communicative than usual, seemed to regard me in the light of an intruder. An elderly tinker, the father of the bride, gray as a leafless thorn in winter, but still stalwart and strong, sat admiring a bit of spelter of about a pound weight. It was gold, he said, or, as he pronounced the word, "guild," which had been found in an old cairn, and was of immense value, "for it was peer guild, and that was the best o' guild;" but if I pleased, he would sell it to me, a very great bargain. I was engaged with some difficulty in declining the offer, when we were interrupted by the sounds of the bag-pipe. Giant Grimbo and Billy Breeches had succeeded in regaining their feet, and were seen staggering towards the cave. "Where's the whisky, Billy?" inquired the proprietor of the gold, addressing himself to the man of the small clothes. Whisky!" said Billy, "ask Grimbo." "Where's the whisky, Grimbo?" reiterated the tinker. "Whisky!" replied Grimbo, "Whisky!" and yet again, after a pause and a hiccup, "Whisky!" "Ye confounded blacks!" said the tinker, springing to his feet with an agility wonderful for an age so advanced as his, "Have you drank it all? But take that, Grimbo, he added, planting a blow full on the side of the giant's head, which prostrated his vast length along the floor of the cave. "And take that, Billy," he iterated, dealing such another blow to the shorter man, which sent him right athwart his prostrate comrade. And then, turning to me she remarked with perfect coolness, "That, master, I call smart hitting." “Honest lad,” whispered one of the women immediately after, "it will be a reugh time wi' us here the nicht: you had just better be stepping your ways." I had already begun to think so without prompting; and so, taking my leave of the gipsies, I failed being, as I had proposed, one of the witnesses of the wedding. There is a sort of grotesque humor in scenes of the kind described, that has charms for artists and authors of a particular class,--some of them men of broad sympathies and great genius; and hence, through their representations, literary and pictorial, the ludicrous point of view has come to be the conventional and ordinary one. And yet it is a sad enough mer riment, after all, that has for its subject a degradation so extreme. I never knew a gipsy that seemed to possess a moral sense,- —a degree of Pariahism which has been reached by only one other class in the country, and that a small one,—the descendants of degraded females in our large towns. An education in Scotland, however secular in its character, always casts a certain amount of enlightenment on the conscience; a home, however humble, whose inmates win their bread by honest industry, has a similar effect; but in the peculiar walks in which for generations there has been no education of any kind, or in which bread has been the wages of infamy, the moral sense seems so wholly obliterated, that there appears to survive nothing in the mind to which the missionary or the moralist can appeal. It seems scarce possible for a man to know even a very little of these classes, without learning, in consequence, to respect honest labor, and even secular knowledge, as at least the second-best things, in their moral bearing and influence, that can exist among a people. CHAPTER XVIII "For such is the flaw or the depth of the plan BURNS DURING my period of convalescence, I amused myself in hewing for my uncles, from an original design, an ornate dialstone; and the dial-stone still exists, to show that my skill as a stone-cutter rose somewhat above the average of the profession in those parts of the country in which it ranks highest. Gradually as I recovered health and strength, little jobs came dropping in. I executed sculptured tablets in a style not common in the north of Scotland; introduced into the churchyards of the locality a better type of tombstone than had obtained in them before, save, mayhap, at a very early period; distanced all my competitors in the art of inscription-cutting; and at length found that, without exposing my weakened lungs to the rough tear and wear to which the ordinary stonecutter must subject himself, I could live. I deemed it an advantage, too, rather than the reverse, that my new branch of employment brought me not unfrequently for a few days into country districts sufficiently distant from home to present me with new fields of observation, and to open up new tracts of inquiry. Sometimes I spent half a week in a farm-house in the neighborhood of some country churchyard,-sometimes I lodged in a village,-oftener than once I sheltered beside some gentleman's seat, where the august shadow of lairdship lay heavy on society; and in this way I came to see and know a good deal of the Scottish people, in their many-colored aspects, of which otherwise I might have remained ignorant. At times, too, on some dusty cottage shelf I succeeded in picking up a rare book, or, what was not less welcome, got a curious tradition from the cottager; or there lay within the reach of an evening walk some interesting piece of antiquity, or some rock-section, which I found it profitable to visit. A solitary burying-ground, too, situated, as country burying-grounds usually are, in some pleasant spot, and surrounded by its groupes of ancient trees, formed a much more delightful scene of labor than a dusty work-shed, or some open area in a busy town; and altogether I found my new mode of life a quie : and happy one. Nor, with all its tranquillity, was it a sort of life in which the intellect was in any great danger of falling asleep. There was scarce a locality in which new game might not be started, that, in the running down, kept the faculties in full play. Let me exemplify by describing the courses of inquiry, physical and metaphysical, which opened up to me when spending a few days, first in the burying-ground of Kirkmichael, and next in the churchyard of Nigg. I have elsewhere somewhat fancifully described the ruinous. chapel and solitary grave-yard of Kirkmichael as lying on the sweep of a gentle declivity, within a few yards of a flat seabeach, so little exposed to the winds, that it would seem as if " ocean muffled its waves in approaching this field of the dead." And so the two vegetations,--that of the land and of the sea,―undisturbed by the surf, which on opener coasts prevents the growth of either along the upper littoral line, where the waves beat heaviest, here meet and mingle, each encroaching for a little way on the province of the other. And at meal-times, and when returning Homewards in the evening along the shore, it furnished me with amusement enough to |