Every few minutes a hare started out of the dry grass: he always
scampered up the Down and stopped to look at us from the ridge. The hare
runs faster up hill than down. By the cornfields there were wire
nettings to stop them; but nothing is easier than for any passer-by who
feels an interest in hares and rabbits, and does not like to see them
jealously excluded, to open a gap. Hares were very numerous--temptingly
so. Not far from where the track crossed a lonely road was a gipsy
encampment; that swarthy people are ever about when anything is going
on, and the reapers were busy in the corn. The dead dry thorns of the
hedge answered very well to boil their pot with. Their tents, formed by
thrusting the ends of long bent rods like half-hoops into the turf,
looked dark like the canvas of a barge.

These 'gips'--country folk do not say gipsy--were unknown to us; but we
were on terms with some members of a tribe who called at our house
several times in the course of the year to buy willow. The men wore
golden earrings, and bought 'Black Sally,' a withy that has a dark bark,
for pegs, and 'bolts' of osier for basket-making. A bolt is a bundle of
forty inches in circumference. Though the women tell fortunes, and mix
the 'dark man' and the 'light man,' the 'journey' and the 'letter' to
perfection, till the ladies half believe, I doubt if they know much of
true palmistry. The magic of the past always had a charm for me. I had
learned to know the lines, from that which winds along at the base of
the thumb-ball and if clear means health and long life, to that which
crosses close to the fingers and indicates the course of love, and had
traced them on many a delicate palm. So that the 'gips' could tell me
nothing new.

The women are the hardiest in the country; they simply ignore the