n, borrowed
_the umbrella from Wilks' Coffee-House_, shall the next time be
welcome to the maid's _pattens_." An umbrella carried by a man was
obviously then considered as extreme effeminacy. As late as in 1778,
one John Macdonald, a footman, who has written his own life, informs
us that when he used "a fine silk umbrella, which he had brought from
Spain, he could not with any comfort to himself use it; the people
calling out 'Frenchman! why don't you get a coach?'" The fact was that
the hackney-coachmen and the chairmen, joining with the true _esprit
de corps_, were clamorous against this portentous rival. This footman,
in 1778, gives us further information. "At this time there were no
umbrellas wore in London, except in noblemen's and gentlemen's houses,
where there was a large one hung in the hall to hold over a lady or a
gentleman, if it rained between the door and their carriage." His
sister was compelled to quit his arm one day from the abuse he drew
down on himself and his umbrella. But he adds, that "he persisted for
three months till they took no further notice of this novelty.
Foreigners began to use theirs, and then the English. Now it is become
a great trade in London." This footman, if he does not arrogate too
much to his own confidence, was the first man distinguished by
carrying and using a silken umbrella. He is the founder of a most
populous school. The state of our population might now in some degree
be ascertained by the number of umbrellas.

_New Monthly Magazine._

* * * * *

GIPSIES.

Gipsies in times of yore were the scape-goats of the peasantry: if
"cock" were "purloined" or any other rural mischief done by night, it
was immediately fathered upon a neighbouring tent of "the dark race."
No further evidence was required than the pot boiling on stick
transverse: no one hesitated to conclude that the said pot contained
the _corpus delicti_: that the individual missing cock was there
parboiling, and that the swarthy race lolling around the fire, or
peeping from beneath the canvass roof, were resting from the unholy
labours of the night. Crime, however, has made such rapid marches that
it has long been seen that the gipsies could not perpetrate the whole
of it: and now it is pretty clear they are, and probably have always
been, innocent of the whole of it. It is an event of extreme rarity to
see a gipsy in a court of justice, and we have reason to believe that
i