leer of yours makes a pretty woman's heart ache;
you ha'n't that simper about the mouth for nothing--" The uncouth
gibberish with which all this was uttered, like the darkness of an
oracle, made us the more attentive to it. To be short, the Knight left
the money with her that he had crossed her hand with, and got up again on
his horse.

As we were riding away, Sir Roger told me, that he knew several sensible
people who believed these gipsies now and then foretold very strange
things; and for half an hour together appeared more jocund than ordinary.
In the height of his good-humour, meeting a common beggar upon the road
who was no conjurer, as he went to relieve him he found his pocket was
picked; that being a kind of palmistry at which this race of vermin are
very dexterous.

I might here entertain my reader with historical remarks on this idle
profligate people, who infest all the countries of Europe, and live in
the midst of governments in a kind of commonwealth by themselves. But
instead of entering into observations of this nature, I shall fill the
remaining part of my paper with a story which is still fresh in Holland,
and was printed in one of our monthly accounts about twenty years ago.
"As the _trekschuyt_, or hackney-boat, which carries passengers from
Leyden to Amsterdam, was putting off, a boy running along the side of the
canal desired to be taken in; which the master of the boat refused,
because the lad had not quite money enough to pay the usual fare. An
eminent merchant being pleased with the looks of the boy, and secretly
touched with compassion towards him, paid the money for him, and ordered
him to be taken on board. Upon talking with him afterwards, he found that
he could speak readily in three or four languages, and learned upon
further examination that he had been stolen away when he was a child by a
gipsy, and had rambled ever since with a gang of those strollers[142] up
and down several parts of Europe. It happened that the merchant, whose
heart seems to have inclined towards the boy by a secret kind of
instinct, had himself lost a child some years before. The parents, after
a long search for him, gave him for drowned in one of the canals with
which that country abounds; and the mother was so afflicted at the loss
of a fine boy, who was her only son, that she died for grief of it. Upon
laying together all particulars, and examining the several moles and
marks by which the mother used to describe