uple, and the ceremony was deemed complete at its close. And I now
expected to witness something similar. In an opening in the wood above,
I encountered two very drunk gipsies, and saw the first-fruits of the
coming merriment. One of the two was an uncouth-looking monster,
sallow-skinned, flat-faced, round-shouldered, long and thinly limbed, at
least six feet two inches in height, and, from his strange
misproportions, he might have passed for seven feet any day, were it not
that his trousers, made for a much shorter man, and rising to the middle
of his calfless leg, gave him much the appearance of a big boy walking
on stilts. The boys of the place called him "Giant Grimbo;" while his
companion, a tight dapper little fellow, who always showed off a
compact, well-rounded leg in corduroy inexpressibles, they had learned
to distinguish as "Billy Breeches." The giant, who carried a bagpipe,
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 downwards. At the
one fire an old gipsy woman was engaged in baking oaten cakes; and a
great pot, that dispensed through the cave the savoury odour of unlucky
poultry out short in the middle of their days, and of hapless hares
destroyed without the game licence, depended over the other. An ass, the
common property of the tribe, stood meditating in the foreground; 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 dr