puir folk than just dinging down a saxpence in the broad on the sabbath, and kilting, and scourging, and drumming them a' the six days o' the week besides." Such was the gossip over the good twopenny in every ale-house within three or four miles of Ellangowan, that being about the diameter of the orbit in which our friend Godfrey Bertram, Esq. J. P. must be considered as the principal luminary. Still greater scope was given to evil. tongues by the removal of a colony of gypsies, with one of whom our reader is somewhat acquainted, and who had for a great many years enjoyed their chief settlement upon the estate of Ellangowan. DLE CHAPTER VII. Come, princes of the ragged regiment, You of the blood! Prigg, my most upright lord, Beggar's Bush. ALTHOUGH the character of those gypsy tribes, which formerly inundated most of the nations of Europe, and which in some. degree still subsist among them as a distinct people, is generally understood, the reader will pardon my saying a few words respecting their situation in Scotland. It is well known that the gypsies were, at an early period, acknowledged as a separate and independent race by one of the Scottish monarchs, and that they were less favourably distinguished by a subse quent law, which rendered the character of gypsy equal, in the judicial balance, to that of common and habitual thief, and prescribed his punishment accordingly. Notwithstanding the severity of this and other statutes, the fraternity prospered amid the distresses of the country, and received large accessions from among those whom famine, oppression, or the sword of war, had deprived of the ordinary means of subsistence. They lost in a great measure, by this intermixture, the national character of Egyptians, and became a mingled race, having all the idleness and predatory habits of their eastern ancestors, with a ferocity which they probably borrowed from the men of the north who joined their society. They travelled in different bands, and had rules among themselves, by which each tribe was confined to its own district. The slightest invasion of the precincts which had been assigned to another tribe produced desperate skirmishes, in which there was often much blood shed. The patriotic Fletcher of Saltoun drew a picture of these banditti about a century ago, which my readers will peruse with astonishment. "There are at this day in Scotland (besides a great many poor families very meanly provided for by the church boxes, with others, who, by living upon bad food, fall into various diseases) two hundred thousand people begging from door to door. These are not only no way advantageous, but a very grievous burden to so poor a country. And though the number of them be perhaps double to what it was formerly, by reason of this present great distress, yet in all times there have been about one hundred thousand of those vagabonds, who have lived without any regard or subjection either to the laws of the land, or even those of God and nature; No magistrate could ever discover, or be informed, which way one in a hundred of these wretches died, or that ever they were baptized. Many mur ders have been discovered among them; and they are not only a most unspeakable oppression to poor tenants, (who, if they give not bread, or some kind of provision to perhaps forty such villains in one day, are sure to be insulted by them,) but they rob many poor people who live in houses distant from any neighbourhood. In years of plenty many thousands of them meet together in the mountains, where they feast and riot for many days; and at country weddings, markets, burials, and other the like public occasions, they are to be seen, both man and woman, perpetually drunk, cursing, blaspheming, and fighting together." Notwithstanding the deplorable picture presented in this extract, and which Fletcher himself, though the energetic and eloquent friend of freedom, saw no better mode of correcting than by introducing a system of domestic slavery, the progress of time, and increase both of the means of life and of the power of the laws, gradual |