1

I.

YANKEE GYPSIES.

"Here's to budgets, packs, and wallets;
Here's to all the wandering train."

BURNS. 1

I CONFESS it, I am keenly sensitive to "skyey influences." 2 I profess no indifference to the movements of that capricious old gentleman known as the clerk of the weather. I cannot conceal my interest in the behavior of that patriarchal bird whose wooden similitude gyrates on the church spire. Winter proper is well enough. Let the thermometer go to zero if it will; so much the better, if thereby the very winds are frozen and unable to flap their stiff wings. Sounds of bells in the keen air, clear, musical, heartinspiring; quick tripping of fair moccasined feet on glittering ice pavements; bright eyes glancing above the uplifted muff like a sultana's behind the folds of her yashmak; schoolboys coasting down street like

1 From the closing air in The Jolly Beggars, a cantata.

2

"A breath thou art

mad Greenlanders; the cold brilliance of oblique sun-
beams flashing back from wide surfaces of glittering
snow, or blazing upon ice jewelry of tree and roof:
there is nothing in all this to complain of. A storm
of summer has its redeeming sublimities,
its slow,
upheaving mountains of cloud glooming in the west-
ern horizon like new-created volcanoes, veined with
fire, shattered by exploding thunders. Even the wild
gales of the equinox have their varieties, - sounds of
wind-shaken woods and waters, creak and clatter of
sign and casement, hurricane puffs, and down-rushing
rain-spouts. But this dull, dark autumn day of thaw
and rain, when the very clouds seem too spiritless and
languid to storm outright or take themselves out of
the way of fair weather; wet beneath and above,
reminding one of that rayless atmosphere of Dante's
Third Circle, where the infernal Priessnitz 1 adminis-
ters his hydropathic torment, —

"A heavy, cursed, and relentless drench, -
The land it soaks is putrid; "

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or rather, as everything animate and inanimate is seething in warm mist, suggesting the idea that Nature, grown old and rheumatic, is trying the efficacy of a Thomsonian steam-box 2 on a grand scale; no sounds save the heavy plash of muddy feet on the pavements; the monotonous, melancholy drip from trees and roofs; the distressful gurgling of waterducts, swallowing the dirty amalgam of the gutters; a dim, leaden-colored horizon of only a few yards in diameter, shutting down about one, beyond which nothing is visible save in faint line or dark projection; the ghost of a church spire or the eidolon of a chimney-pot, he who can extract pleasurable emotions from the alembic of such a day has a trick of alchemy with which I am wholly unacquainted.

now.

Hark! a rap at my door. Welcome anybody just One gains nothing by attempting to shut out the sprites of the weather. They come in at the keyhole; they peer through the dripping panes; they insinuate themselves through the crevices of the casement, or plump down chimney astride of the raindrops.

I rise and throw open the door. A tall, shambling, loose-jointed figure; a pinched, shrewd face, sun-brown and wind-dried; small, quick-winking black eyes, there he stands, the water dripping from his pulpy hat and ragged elbows.

I speak to him; but he returns no answer. With a dumb show of misery, quite touching, he hands me a soiled piece of parchment, whereon I read what purports to be a melancholy account of shipwreck and disaster, to the particular detriment, loss, and damnification of one Pietro Frugoni, who is, in consequence, sorely in want of the alms of all charitable Christian persons, and who is, in short, the bearer of this veracious document, duly certified and indorsed by an Italian consul in one of our Atlantic cities, of a high-sounding, but to Yankee organs unpronounceable, name.

Here commences a struggle. Every man, the Mahometans tell us, has two attendant angels, - the good one on his right shoulder, the bad on his left. "Give," says Benevolence, as with some difficulty I fish up a small coin from the depths of my pocket. "Not a cent," says selfish Prudence; and I drop it from my fingers. "Think," says the good angel, “ of the poor stranger in a strange land, just escaped from the terrors of the sea-storm, in which his little property has perished, thrown half-naked and helpless on our shores, ignorant of our language, and unable to find employment suited to his capacity." "A vile impostor!" replies the left-hand sentinel; "his paper purchased from one of those ready-writers in New York who manufacture beggar-credentials at the low price of one dollar per copy, with earthquakes, fires, or shipwrecks, to suit customers."

Amidst this confusion of tongues I take another survey of my visitant. Ha! a light dawns upon me. That shrewd, old face, with its sharp, winking eyes, is no stranger to me. Pietro Frugoni, I have seen thee before. Si, signor, that face of thine has looked at me over a dirty white neckcloth, with the corners of that cunning mouth drawn downwards, and those small eyes turned up in sanctimonious gravity, while thou wast offering to a crowd of half-grown boys an extemporaneous exhortation in the capacity of a travelling preacher. Have I not seen it peering out from under a blanket, as that of a poor Penobscot Indian, who had lost the use of his hands while trapping on the Madawaska? Is it not the face of the forlorn father of six small children, whom the "marcury doctors" had " pisened" and crippled? Did it not belong to that down-east unfortunate who had been out to the "Genesee country" 1 and got the "fevernnager," and whose hand shook so pitifully when held out to receive my poor gift? The same, under all disguises, - Stephen Leathers, of Barrington, - him, and none other! Let me conjure him into his own

likeness:

"Well, Stephen, what news from old Barrington?" "Oh, well, I thought I knew ye," he answers, not the least disconcerted. "How do you do? and how 's your folks? All well, I hope. I took this 'ere paper, you see, to help a poor furriner, who could n't make himself understood any more than a wild goose. I thought I'd just start him for'ard a little. It seemed a marcy to do it."

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Well and shiftily answered, thou ragged Proteus. One cannot be angry with such a fellow. I will just inquire into the present state of his Gospel mission and about the condition of his tribe on the Penobscot; and it may be not amiss to congratulate him on the success of the steam-doctors in sweating the “pisen of the regular faculty out of him. But he evidently has no wish to enter into idle conversation. Intent upon his benevolent errand he is already clattering down stairs. Involuntarily I glance out of the window just in season to catch a single glimpse of him ere he is swallowed up in the mist.

He has gone; and, knave as he is, I can hardly help exclaiming, "Luck go with him!" He has