t it's a magpie," next to the water-
wagtail the gypsies' most famous bird. On going up to the bush they
discovered a magpie crouched among the leaves. As it did not stir at
their approach, Borrow's friend said to him: "It is wounded--or else
dying--or is it a tame bird escaped from a cage?"

"Hawk!" said Borrow, laconically, and turned up his face and gazed into
the sky. "The magpie is waiting till the hawk has caught his quarry and
made his meal. I fancy he has himself been 'chivvied' by the hawk, as
the gypsies would say."

And there, sure enough, beneath one of the silver clouds that specked the
dazzling blue a hawk--one of the kind which takes its prey in the open
rather than in the thick woodlands--was wheeling up and up, and trying
its best to get above a poor little lark in order to stoop at and devour
it. That the magpie had seen the hawk and had been a witness of the
opening of the tragedy of the lark was evident, for in its dread of the
common foe of all well-intentioned and honest birds, it had forgotten its
fear of all creatures except the hawk. Man it looked upon as a
protecting friend.

As Borrow and his friend were gazing at the bird a woman's voice at their
elbows said--

"It's lucky to chivvy the hawk what chivvies a magpie. I shall stop here
till the hawk's flew away."

They turned round, and there stood a magnificent gypsy woman, carrying,
gypsy fashion, a weakly child that, in spite of its sallow and wasted
cheek, proclaimed itself to be hers. By her side stood a young gypsy
girl of about seventeen years of age. She was beautiful--quite
remarkably so--but her beauty was not of the typical Romany kind. It
was, perhaps, more like the beauty of a Capri girl.

She was bareheaded--there was not even a gypsy handkerchief on her
head--her hair was not plaited, and was not smooth and glossy like a
gypsy girl's hair, but flowed thick and heavy and rippling down the back
of her neck and upon her shoulders. In the tumbled tresses glittered
certain objects, which at first sight seemed to be jewels. They were
small dead dragon-flies of the crimson kind called "sylphs."

To Borrow and his friend these gypsies were well known. The woman with
the child was one of the Boswells: I dare not say what was her
connection, if any, with "Boswell the Great"--I mean Sylvester Boswell,
the grammarian and "well-known and popalated gipsy of Codling Gap," who,
on a memorable occasion, wrote so eloquently abo