heavy dragoons, that was stationed in the barracks of. in consequence of the disturbed state of the neighbourhood. This unusual mode was absolutely necessary; for not only were Desfield's men attached to him by a long course of kindness and liberality, and therefore dangerous instruments under the command of so wily and desperate a leader; but the population was in a temper of mind that disposed them to thwart any civil force, however proper its conduct, or justifiable the object for which it was employed.

A party of eight men was selected from the regiment, and they were placed under the orders of the police officer, who, to prevent the possibility of suspicion, was disguised in a dragoon's undress jacket. The military commander, however, was a serjeant, a tall, powerful, enterprising fellow of brutal courage, who, in the campaigns throughout the Peninsular war, had given frequent and memorable proofs that, like Sylla, he had a head to plan, and a heart to execute any enterprize, however desperate.

Desfield for years had been a punctual attendant at the market ofwhere his dealings had always been correct and liberal. The market day was selected to effect his capture. It was calculated that the party, by surprising his house in his absence, could overpower resistance and overcome stratagem with sufficient promptitude, to make themselves masters of all Desfield's machinery of trade, after which the capture of the man was of less consequence, or at least of more easy attainment.

L

The party of dragoons, in their drill jackets, proceeded carelessly, as if exercising their horses, upon the highway, until they came to the corner of the lane which led to the house. Putting their horses suddenly upon the quickest trot, they hoped to surprise the place, which was about half a mile from the road. To their astonishment, they found every gate locked, and every impediment thrown in the way of their approach. These obstacles overcome, they next found that the house itself was fastened and barricadoed in a formidable manner. Not a sound was heard within, excepting the rushing wind of the strongest draft furnace, the smoke of which was issuing from the roof, and first occasioned a supposition that the building was on fire.

Whether it was merely a matter of chance, or whether Desfield had obtain

ed any information of his danger, was never ascertained; but that day, he had sent his wife and daughter to the market, and had himself stayed at home, and was thus prepared for the attack. There were probably two reasons for him to be on his guard. After he had ceased to keep the police in his pay, his natural sagacity warned him that his impunity was at an end: but he had, I believe, "made his fortune," and his hope was to "leave off business, and retire upon his earnings," and thus set the police at defiance. He had, moreover, among his old adherents, a superintendent of his workmen, a shrewd, crafty, hard-headed Scotchman, a very Bibo at potations, but with the difference that his brain seemed to have some chemical repulsion to liquors. This fellow used to drink and sing among the troopers and police officers, and worm out their secrets; and he would, in a similar way, pick up all the gossip of the neighbourhood, and report it to his master. These are sufficient clues to elucidate the fact of Desfield's attitude of defence. That day he was laying the foundation of his future safety: his fate depended on his undisturbed state for a few hours.

The serjeant contrived to widen a gap in the hedge, through which he passed with his men, whilst the policeman, with two of the troopers, forced a gate off the hinges in front of the house. The soldiers were placed at intervals to prevent any person's escape; and the serjeant, with the police officer, throwing themselves off their horses, immediately assailed the front door, demanding admittance in the name of the king.

The house, however, was very different from a modern structure. It was the centre division of a building which had been erected by a small society of Roman Catholics, in the latter part of the reign of Charles II., and it very far surpassed even the massy character of the rural domestic architecture of the period. It was full of secret contrivances for concealment, whilst its strength evinced the apprehensions of its occupants that they might be exposed to the attacks of their infuriated persecutors; it likewise but too clearly spoke the hopes of the party, that the power of the Duke of York might enable them to repel force by force.

The police officer tried his staff and small iron crow-bar against the massive oaken door, studded with nails and crossed in every direction with ribs of iron. After a contemptuous laugh at these puny efforts, the Herculean ser

jeant seized a huge log of wood which had incautiously been left in the yard, and like a giant thundered with his battering ram against the portal. The executor of the civil law had his revenge of the wielder of the law of force. The panting, exhausted trooper threw down the timber, and wiping the perspiration off his forehead, damned the door and swore that nothing less than a ninepounder could burst it open. Both were at fault: each looked at the other in the character of persons utterly foiled in their presumptuous confidence.

The bold trooper again took the lead. He espied a short ladder under a hedge, and placed it beneath one of the lower windows. The whole tier of windows, however, were secured with the strong iron matted bars of former days, and they had massive oaken shutters within. The stone sill and coping of the casement were honeycombed with age, and the brawny arm of the trooper wrenched one of the iron stauncheons from its sockets; but the inner shutter resisted his utmost force. He was again foiled. He thought a moment, descended the ladder morosely, and cursed the unsoldierly service he had been sent to.

"The game is up," said the hero of the municipal law-the representative of the body politic. "If Desfield is within, he'll have time to destroy all his notes, plates, and presses before we can get at him-but, pshaw! whether he is in the house or not, what does it signify? You might as well think to get into parliament without money, or out of chancery without it. We may as well be off."

"Humph!" said the musing serjeant; "have you a half-crown about you? for that will get us in fast enough."

66 Twenty half-crowns, and twenty to them, are at your command; but who the devil is there here that we can bribe?"

New, friend civilian, I'll be in my saddle, and you may lie on the grass, keeping watch with me till my men return with the scaling ladder, which will reach the windows in the roof. If old Beelzebub himself is in the house we can't get him out till the ladder comes; and if old Beelzebub were defended by the pope and the great Turk, see if he escapes Serjeant - of the

Heavy Dragoons, when the men bring the ladder."

Presently the troopers were seen upon a hard trot, returning across the moor. The serjeant leaped from his horse, and placing the ladder against a small window in the roof, he thrust aside the police officer and gaily ascended.

"You are my prisoner."

"With all my heart; but at my personal pleasure and convenience," replied a manly voice in a slow, firm, and composed tone.

"Surrender, in the name of the king, or by G I'll fire," said the serjeant, seizing his pistol, and thrusting his arm through the glass, and tearing away the frame work.

"Fire," replied Desfield, in the same resolute, confident tone; "fire and be d-d; miss me, and throw away powder; hit me, and you'll be hanged."

The serjeant instantly fired: his pistol burst, and shattered his hand and arm to pieces.

"Ha ha! ha! well, an old campaigner, and not take better care of his fire-arms-ha! ha! ha!"

"Burn another paper, and you are a dead man," said the serjeant, with undaunted resolution, as he withdrew his mutilated arm, and thrust in his left hand with the remaining pistol.

"I'm a dead man, perhaps, if I don't burn them," replied Desfield, with the same tone of composure.

The serjeant again fired.

"Ha! ha! ha!—what, an old peninsular-a Waterloo man-and no better shot; come, trooper, try it once more, if you don't hit you shall quit the Dragoons; you're a disgrace to the service."

good fellow; now take your teeth and pull out that large bit of bone that sticks out of the arm, and then just strap me up below the elbow, to preventa fellow's

bleeding to death; and I shall be all comfortable till I get to the barracks." Whilst this rude surgery was going on, the policeman ascended the ladder.

"Come, come, now, Mr. Desfield, what's the use now of resistance? you know I've got eight dragoons below." "Seven and a fraction, for you can't call the serjeant a whole man.'

"

"Now, Mr. Desfield, what is the use of chaffing? Give over burning them papers; you know I have always been merciful in the execution of my dutyand to you"

"Merciful to me! and what have you been to those who could not pay you for your mercy?" cried Desfield, in a tone of bitter irony. "Where is your blood-money for poor innocent Winston? and where are his wife and children? O yes! you are merciful.Merciful as the gambler to the confiding stripling-merciful as the lecher to the orphan; ay, as the beadle to the pauper; ay, ay, you are merciful-your tribe is merciful-as the law is merci ful to the lawyer."

"Then, I suppose, there is no longer any honour or understanding between us. Will you surrender?"

"When it suits my purpose-wait!" The officer rested on the ladder for ten minutes, until Desfield had destroyed his papers. "And now," said Desfield, rising from the forge, "I am at your service I will go quietly to the magistrate. I surrender, on condition that you offer me no violence: that you do not take me ignominiously through the crowd."

"I promise, on my honour." "Then I will let you enter the house, ten times your strength could not have forced an entrance."

"I will take you quietly, and without any disrespect."

"Desfield left the garret, and descended to open the front door.

To be concluded in our next.

ON A YOUNG LADY WEARING A GOLD KEY ON HER BOSOM.

Let bigots boast the key of heaven
Is vested in the Pope,
And that to him alone is given
This mystic pledge of hope.

Such superstition is a jest

To lead our faith astray;

For cast a glance at Cynthea's breastThere's both the heaven and key.

EPIGRAM-(MUTUAL EXCHANGE.)

I took your draughts;-I took your pills: Now, take my drafts and cash my bills. J.R.P.

THOUGHTS ON GAMING.

GAMING seems of all vices the most destructive to happiness; it is ever attended by a large train of diabolical companions, envy, deceit, profuseness, and impiety. Health, peace of mind, love, family, friends, country, and, in short, every thing valuable or desirable, are sacrificed to it; and to what are they sacrificed? Why, to avarice ; avarice, the meanest of vices. The love of gaming is nothing more than the love of other people's money. It is not the avarice of a miser; it is the avarice of a thief, a robber, or rather the cowardly avarice of a pickpocket.

It is ridiculous to hear the votaries of gaming term it an amusement, an inoffensive relaxation, &c. Those who so miscall it, must notwithstanding allow it to be an irrational, or unimproving diversion; and that at the best it is but murdering time. But upon examination every observer may discern, that dallying with the temptation draws us on insensibly to destruction; and what shall be said of those who take no delight in gaming, yet readily acquiesce on the slightest solicitation? Surely complaisance is a poor excuse for doing a foolish or a wicked action, and that every gamester is a knave or fool is a most palpable truth. A certain nobleman, hearing a gentleman spoken of, who was said to be a great gamester; he is a most incorrigible block head, cries my lord: but on being assured he was a man of very brilliant parts; if so, replies my lord, he must be a rank scoundrel: not so, my lord, replies the other, he bears the character of a gentleman of great worth and honour. 'That cannot be," retorts the nobleman; "every gamester is either a rogue or fool, pike or gudgeon; and honour never approaches nearer to the heart of such a one than the tip of his tongue.

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The moment gaming commences a period is put to all conversation and improvement; friendship and society, benevolence and humanity cease, and nothing further is thought of but the ruin of those you are in company with; the ruin of those to whom you often make the strongest protestations of friendship: the gamester's happiness, like the devil's, depends on the misery of others: and like Satan too, he smiles on those whom in his heart he devotes to destruction.-The life of a gamester is a life of uncertainty, consequently of unhappiness: he can never properly call any thing his own, not being as

sured of its possession one moment longer than till his next sitting down at the gaming table. The thriving gamester, how precarious is his thriving he is the worst of robbers, and the unfortunate, the worst of self-murderers; a murderer, who involves all those innocents who may, unfortunately, have any connection with him, in the dismal gulf of beggary and wretched depend

ance.

If covetousness of another man's property, and discontent of our own, be a breach of the divine command, "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's goods," &c., the gamester is ever and superlatively guilty. I have somewhere read of a gentleman, who had an aversion to all sorts of gaming, being urged to no purpose by another to sport a little money;- -"Sure," cries the tempter, you must love your money vastly to be afraid of venturing a trifle of it!" "It is true," replied the other, "I do love my own money; yet no person had ever reason to say I was fond of another

man's."

Should they be married, how can they reflect on the hazards they run of destroying the happiness of wife, children, friends, &c.? And when ill fortune presents itself, how often are they so cowardly as to have recourse to a pistol, and by suicide, the greatest of crimes, rush uncalled and unprepared into the presence of an offended God, leaving those innocents to confront a danger they themselves were afraid to combat? We should do well at intervals to consider the pernicious effects of this vice, both as to the consequences in this state of existence, and those which extend to a future life. Such reflections might help to delay or stop us in our mad ca

reer.

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 loll ing around the fire, or peeping from beneath the canvas 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 it has come to pass that farmers entertain a belief that the tent of the wanderer, with its nightly blaze and its dark shadows flitting about it, is a protection to their property. There is every probability in favour of the justice of this character. The life of the gipsy is not unlucrative: his wants are few and coarse, and the calls upon him are scarcely any. He pays no rent: he is exempt from taxes; he spends nothing in the luxury of attire: no man can bring him in a bill. Being himself a mender and universal repairer, he is under the necessity of demanding no man's aid. His horse or his ass feeds on Nature's common, the hedge-side, the waste corner, the forest thicket, well known and long haunted by him and his tribe. Gipsies are subject to few diseases; they seldom ask the doctor's assistance but for one friendly office, and that serves a man his lifetime. The open air, the inconstancy of their labour, the sufficiency of their food, and the quantity of healthy exercise, necessarily render these Arabs of civilization the healthiest part of the people. As the monks of old always managed to select a happy site for their establishments, so does the gipsy always contrive to fix upon a pleasant and healthy spot for the pitching of his tent. It is sure to be near a brook for the supply of fresh water for the pot, and a washing-place for the family rags; it generally lies under the shelter of some umbrageous tree, it will always be found to have a view of the road, and invariably placed on the edge of some nice short and sweet morsel of grass for the recreation of the quadrupeds of the party. The character of the gipsy has not been well understood. It is altogether oriental: he is quiet,patient, sober, long suffering, pleasant in speech, indolent but handy, far from specula'ive, and yet good at succedaneum: when his anger is kindled, it descends like lightning: unlike his dog, his wrath gives no notice by grumbling: he blazes up like one of his own fires of dried fern. Quarrels do not often take place among them, but when they do, they are dreadful. The laws of the country in which they sojourn have so far banished the use of knives from among them

that they only grind them, otherwise these conflicts would always be fatal. They fight like tigers with tooth and nail, and knee and toe, and seem animated only with the spirit of dæmonism. Luckily the worst weapon they use is a stick, and, if the devil tempts, a hedgestake. We have been put in mind to say something of the gipsies by having witnessed the consequences of one of these affrays, which has brought us still better acquainted with these singular people. A quarrel originating in jealousy had produced results of the most serious nature. A blow on the head with a fent-pole had evidently produced concussion of the brain if not fracture, and the victim was lying on his straw bed in a state of profound calm. The tent was tripartite, being formed of three main tops meeting in a centre: one was sacred to the women the gynekeion of the Greeks, to the anderoon of the Persians: in the others were collected the whole of the faction of the dying man. Nine or ten swarthy but handsome countenances were anxiously watching the struggling breath of their unhappy comrade-some sobbing, some grief-stricken, some sombre, none savage. An old crone was administering ineffectual milk, perhaps the very woman who had found the same fluid so nutritious some thirty years ago. Before, or rather under, her lay as noble a form as nature ever moulded, with a fine dark, but thoroughly Indian face, covered with the clammy sweat of apoplectic death. There was.

no want of light, the fire at the mouth of the tent sent in a volume of illumination, and when the medical men arrived there was scarcely a hand that did not contain a candle in the hope of aiding their investigation. The man died on the fourth day; the surgeons were compelled to mangle him in their search for a fracture: after his death justice demanded a still further investigation of the corpse; and yet during all these trying circumstances an important witness can declare that the behaviour of the supposed lawless people was not merely decent-it was more than exemplary-it was delicate, tender, nay, refined; it was moreover exempt from prejudice, at the same time that it was full of feeling. Were the details in place here, it would perhaps be allowed that few brighter examples of friendship and right feeling were to be found than in this instance occurred among the "dark race," as they call themselves.

THE HONEST FISHERMAN.

THE Marquis della Scala, an Italian, having invited the gentry of his neighbourhood to a grand entertainment, all the delicacies of the season were accordingly provided. Some of the company had already arrived, in order to pay their very early respects to his Excellency, when the major domo, in a hurry, entered the room.

"My lord," said he, "here is a most wonderful fisherinan below, who has brought one of the finest fish, I believe, in Italy; but then he demands such a price for it!"

"Regard not his price," cried- the Marquis," pay it down directly."

"So I would, please your highness, but he refuses to take money."

"Why, what would the fellow have ?" "A hundred strokes of the strappado on his bare shoulders, my lord; he says he will not bate a single blow."

Here they all ran down to have a view of this rarity of a fisherman.

"A fine fish!" cried the Marquis "what is your demand, my friend?you shall be paid on the instant."

"Not a quartini, my lord: I will not take money. If you would have my fish, you must order me a hundred lashes of the strappado upon my naked back; if not, I shall go and apply elsewhere."

"Rather than lose our fish," said his highness, "let the fellow have his humour. Here," cried he to one of his grooms, discharge this honest man's demand; but be gentle with thy stripes."

The fisherman then stripped, and the groom prepared to put his lord's orders in execution.

"Now, my friend," cried the fisherman, "keep good account, I beseech you, for I am not covetous of a single stroke beyond my due."