diameter, corresponding to the size of the girdle; the cake is then cut into four quadrants, and toasted on the girdle, alternately on both sides, care being taken, both with cakes and bannocks, to prevent the girdle from being so hot as to burn the surface. When the cake is so hardened as to stand on edge, it is placed upon an iron heater, linked upon a bar of the grate, where it toasts leisurely till it be perfectly dry, though no way burnt. If it has lain some days unused, it is toasted anew before it is eaten : it thus constitutes a hearty species of bread, of a tonic quality, to judge by the taste; and which, by many Scotsmen in the higher ranks, is preferred to wheaten bread.

There is just one other utensil indispensable to the cottager, which is a very small barrel or can of stone to hold his salt, which he keeps in a hole in the walls, close by his fire, to prevent its running, from the moisture in the air. He must also have a wooden pail to carry water; in which also his cow is milked, if he has one; on which supposition, too, he must have three cans of stone ware, or vessels of cooper's work, in which the milk is set in the ambry, to stand for casting up the cream.

GYPSIES.

As the author of the admirable romance of Guy Mannering has rendered every thing respecting Scottish Gypsies of extreme interest, the following details, relative to the elopement of the Countess Cassilis with Johnnie Faa, or Faw, the gypsey chief, may not prove uninteresting to our readers.

John, sixth Earl of Cassilis, commonly termed " the grave and solemn Earl," married his first wife, Lady Jane Hamilton, daughter of Thomas, first Earl of Haddington. It is said that this match took place contrary to the inclinations of the young lady, whose affections had been previously engaged by a certain Sir John Faa, of Dunbar, who was neither grave nor solemn, and moreover much handsomer than his successful rival. While Lord Cassilis, who, by the way, was a very zealous puritan, was absent on some mission to England, Sir John with his followers repaired to Cassilis, where the young lady then resided, and persuaded her to elope with him to England. As ill luck would have it, the Earl returned home before the lovers

could cross the Border; pursued and overtook them, and in the conflict all the masquerade gypsies were slain save one, and the weeping Countess brought back to her husband's mansion, where she remained till a dungeon was prepared for her near the village of Maybole, wherein she languished for the remainder of her life in humble sorrow and devotion.

This is one version of the story, still very current in the country where the elopement took place, but it is not supported by the tenor of the ballad, which was composed by the only surviving ravisher, and is contradicted by a numerous jury of matrons, "spinters and knitters in the sun," who pronounce the fair Countess guilty of having eloped with a genuine gypsey, though compelled in some degree to that low-lived indiscretion by certain wicked charms and philtres, of which Faa and his party are said to have possessed the secret. The unfortunate lady was also assailed by the powers of glamour, which the stoutest chastity found quite unable to resist, if unaided by a morsel of the mountain ash-tree, an amber necklace, a stone forced by stripes from the head of a live toad, or the prudent recollection of keeping both thumbs close compressed in the hand, during the presence of the malevolent charmer.

Glamour, according to Scottish interpretation, is that supernatural power of imposing on the eye-sight, by which the appearance of an object shall be totally different from the reality. Sir Walter Scott, describing the wonderful volume of Michael of Balwearie, says:

The most extraordinary instances that are to be met with on the subject of glamour, are collected by Delrio, in his citations from Dubravius' history of Bohemia. Winceslaus, son to the Emperor Charles IV., marrying the Duke of Bavaria's daughter, the duke who understood that his son-in-law delighted in feats of conjuration, sent to Prague for a waggon load of magicians to enliven the nuptials. While the most scientific of these were puzzling for some new illu

It is not now possible to fix the precise date of Lady Cassilis' elopement with the gypsey laddie. She was born in the year 1607, and is said to have died young; but, if she ran off with her lover during her husband's first journey to England, in quality of ruling elder deputed to the assembly of divines at Westminster, 1643, to ratify the solemn league and covenant, she could not even then have been in her first youth; and it is certain that she lived long enough in her confinement at Maybole, to work a piece of tapestry, still preserved at Colzean House, in which she represented her unhappy flight, but with circumstances unsuitable to the details of the ballad, and as if the deceits of glamour had still bewildered her memory; for she is mounted beside her lover, gorgeously attired on a superb white courser,

sion, Winceslaus' family conjuror, Zyto by name, who had slid privately in among the crowd, of a sudden presented himself, having his mouth, as it seemed, entangled on both sides, open to his very ears; he goes straight to the duke's chief conjuror, and swallows him up with all that he wore, saving his pantouffles (slippers), which, being dirty, he spit a great way from him. After this feat, feeling himself uneasy with such a load on his stomach, he hastens to a great tub that stood by full of water, voids the man into it, and them brings him back to the company, dripping wet, and overwhelmed with confusion; on which the other magicians would show no more tricks. This same master Zyto, who, par parenthèse, was, at last, himself carried off bodily by the devil, could appear with any visage he chose. When the king walked on the land, he would seem to swim on the water towards him; or, if his majesty was carried in a litter with horses, Zyto would follow in another borne up by cocks. He made thirty fat swine of so many wisps of hay, and sold them to a rich baker at a very high price, desiring him not to allow them to enter into any water; but the baker forgetting this injunction, found only the wisps of hay swimming on the surface of a pool; and in a mighty chafe seeking out Zyto, who was extended upon a bench, and seemingly asleep, he seized him by one leg to awake him, when lo! both the leg and thigh seemed to remain in his hands, which filled him with so much terror, that he complained no more of the cheat. Zyto, at the banquet of the king, would sometimes change the hands of the guests into the hoofs of an ox or horse, so that they could not extend them to the dishes to help themselves to any thing; and if they looked out of the windows, he beautified their heads with horns; a trick, by the by, which perhaps Johnnie Faa could have played to Lord Cassilis with infinitely greater significance.、、

"Two magicians," says Delrio, "met in the court of Elizabeth, Queen of England, and agreed that in any one thing they should certainly obey each other. The one, thereupon, commands the other to thrust his head out of the casement, which he had no sooner done than a huge pair of stags' horns were seen planted on his forehead, to the no small delight of the spectators, who laughed at, and mocked him extremely; but when it came to the horned magician's turn to be obeyed, he made his adversary stand upright against a wall, which instantly opening, swallowed him up, so that he was never afterwards seen."

and surrounded by a group of persons who bear no resemblance to a herd of tatterdemalion gypsies.

*

But it appears from the criminal records of Edinburgh, that, in January 1624, eight men, among whom were Captain John Faa, and five more of the name of Faa, were convicted on the statute against Egyptians, and suffered according to sentence. We are strongly induced to believe that this was the Johnnie of the ballad, whom Lord Cassilis wisely got hanged in place of slaying him in the field. Indeed, a stranger of the song, as it is sometimes recited, states that eight of the gypsies were hanged at Carlisle, and the rest at the Border. If this conjecture be right, the lady's lover was married as well as herself; for, a few days after John's trial, Helen Faa, relict of the captain, Lucretia Faa, and nine other female gypsies, were brought to judgment and condemned to be drowned; but the barbarous sentence was afterwards commuted to that of banishment, under pain of death to them and all their race should they ever return to Scotland.

The Earl of Cassilis * divorced his lady a mensa et thoro, and confined her, as has been already said, in a tower at Maybole, where eight heads carved in stone, below one of the turrets, are still pointed out as representing eight of the luckess Egyptians. It ought to be remembered, that this frail one did not carry on the noble family into which she married; for she bore only two daughters to the earl, of whom one became the wife of Lord Dundonald, and the other, in the last stage of antiquated virginity, bestowed her hand, upon the youthful Gilbert Burnet, thenthe busy intriguing inmate of Hamilton Palace, where Lady Margaret Kennedy generally resided, afterwards the well-known bishop of Salisbury.

The gypsies, it appears, did not bring any particular religion

* From an abridgement of the acts of parliament and convention, from the reign of King James, we extract the following relative to gipsies, the act, no doubt, under which the dingy gallant, Johnnie Faa suffered, be he the individual in question; though there remains some doubt that the government would hang a man whom they had called upon to assist them in relieving the country of his vagrant brethren, unless he proved refractory to this command. "An act, banishing all vagabonds, called Egyptians, forth of the kingdom for ever, after the first of August, 1609, and not to return under the pain of death, to be execute upon them as notorious thieves, on trial to be taken by an assize, that they are holden and reputed Egyptians, and that none visit them, and all warrants in the contrary are declared void.-Jam. 6, par. 20, cap. 13.

with them from their native country; by which, as the Jews, they could be distinguished among other persons, but regulate themselves in religious matters, according to the country where they live. Being very inconsistent in their choice of residence, they are likewise so in respect to religion. No gypsey has an idea of submission to any fixed profession of faith; it is as easy for him to change his religion at every new village, as for another person to shift his coat. They suffer themselves to be baptised in christian countries; among Mahometans to be circumcised. They are Greeks with Greeks, catholics with catholics, and again profess themselves to be protestants, whenever they happen to reside where that may be the prevailing religion.

From this mutability, we conceive what kind of ideas they have, and from thence we may deduce their general opinions of religion. As parents suffer their children to grow up, without either education or instruction, and were reared in the same manner themselves, so neither the one nor the other have any knowledge of God or religion. Very few of them like to attend to any discourse on the subject; they hear what is said with indifference, nay rather with impatience and repugnance; despising all remonstrance, believing nothing, they live on without the least solicitude, concerning what shall become of them after this life. In this manner the greatest part of these people think, with regard to religion; it naturally follows that their conduct should be conformable to such opinions and conceptions. Every duty is neglected, no prayer ever passes their lips; as little are they to be found in any assembly of public worship; from whence the Wallachians have a saying, "the gypsies' church was built with bacon, and the dogs ate it." The religious party from which a gypsey apostatizes, as little loses a brother believer, as the one to which he goes acquires one. He is neither mahommedan nor christian; for the doctrines of Mahomet and of Christ are unlike unknown or indifferent to him, producing no other effect than, that in Turkey his child is circumcised, and baptised in Christendom. Even this is not done from any motive. of reverence for the commands of religion; at least the circumstance of a gypsey's choosing to have his child several times baptized, in order to get more christening money, strongly in-. dicates a very indifferent reason. This is the state of the gypsey religion in every country where they are found.