idiot, if we wander about the country all
night."

The gipsy king had by this time seated
himself upon the coach-box, with the reins in
his hands.

"You won't—mum—werry well," he said,
addressing my aunt in a little louder tone,
as he saw us moving away, ''you'll 'ear from
me, mum—'cos I will. Rob'ry the gip—scorns
as he flies—to's forest 'ome."

Saying this, he flourished his whip; and,
singing loudly some song about the pleasures
of a gipsy's life, he drove madly across the
common, and was soon lost in the distance,
amongst the trees.

That was the last we ever saw of the gipsy
king, or of the carriage. We reached a
labourer's cottage, where we passed the
night, and we reached our home the next
evening by posting across the country. Miss
Granite, in her usual way, would have no
inquiry made about her loss, and she rather
indulged the belief that the gipsy king had
killed himself by driving over a precipice,
For myself, I could only suppose that the
horses had been sold at a fair in the regular
irregular way; and that the carriage, if
not turned into a show, was built up and
disguised in the almost inaccessible depths of
some forest, where it afforded a snug house
of call for tramps, or a winter home for gipsies
and gipsy babies.

THE ALMANAC-TREE.

A PLUM tree which, for some years
past, has yielded a considerable supply of
pleasant fruit, grows on foreign ground,
over the water. On its trunk is carved,
by some bookseller's apprentice, the word
ALMANACH in grotesque letters, with a
succession of dates above and around it.
From the stem of this tree there start
innumerable branches and twigs, each branch
bearing fruit, or almanacs, of different prices,
from next to nothing a-piece, to three
half-pence each, gradually advancing to half a
franc till the heavy price of a franc is
reached, beyond which limit almanacs
are rarely produced. Two notable
exceptions, however, exist: the Almanac of
the Good Farmer, the Cultivator's Aid-Memory,
a duodecimo volume with hundreds
of engravings, is sold for seven francs. The
same sum purchases the Almanac of the
Good Gardener; a useful  book which may be
considered as an annual new edition of a
standard work, for the sake of introducing
novelties and additions and making corrections
in a publication, the date of whose first
edition is unknown. The Bon Jardinier, though
costly, deserves a place on the handbook
shelf of every country gentleman—supposing
every country gentleman able to read French
—side by side with our own excellent
Gardener's Chronicle.

The fruit of this prolific almanac-tree is
ripe and ready for sale by the month of
October; and, by a sort of horticultural bull,
the plums for eighteen hundred and fifty-nine
are gathered in eighteen hundred and
fifty-eight. The produce of the tree is
mostly similar in shape—that is square, or
nearly so, and flat; but very various in size,
and particularly so in the colour and markings
of the outer rind. There are green
dumplings with parti-coloured blotches.
There are blue, grey, buff, white, and neutral
tinted specimens. Their flavour changes
from year to year. On cutting them open,
there is often found a permutation and
combination, if not an actual repetition, of last
year's black marks, called woodcuts; so
that upon the whole, if this goes on, fears
are likely to be entertained that the produce
of the almanac-tree is attacked by a new
form of potato-blight or vine-disease, and
that it is becoming less and less plummy and
more and more plain. The effect of tasting
the Almanach Comique used to be a good
laugh—lately, it has been a yawn. The
Prophetic Almanac prepares us for little
that is new. The Lunatic Almanac
—although got up by a merry and learned
necromancer, who came down on purpose
from the mountains in the moon—has scarcely
the merit of original eccentricity. The
Almanach Chantant, or Singing Almanac,
is a record of songs that have been heard
before; for instance, a ballad from Robert
the Devil (the words only are given, in all
cases, with the address of the shop where
the music may be bought) is no novelty in
eighteen hundred and fifty-nine. Nevertheless,
Susan's Fête-day is a very comic song,
even to read.

Perhaps we ought not to expect too much
from annual autumn leaves like these. At
least, they have the great merit of variety at
the first time of inspecting them. The
Almanac of Dames and Demoiselles
illustrates the zodiacal sign, the Fishes, by a
caricature of the modern art of pisciculture;
a Norman nurse is dandling a fish in her
lap and rocking another in a cradle. It
records numerous deaths from crinoline, and
gives a pretty story of a schoolgirl's friendship
for—a white rose. Polichinelle, or Punch, a
perpetual almanac, and La Mère Gigogne
(Punch's wife, or, as we should say, Judy)
are children's books. The first for the
nursery, with picture-alphabet and words in one
syllable; the second for youngsters of longer
growth, with plenty of cuts—some good and
new, some sadly worn and threadbare—
affectionate addresses, apologues, and tales,
certain of which latter display considerable
ingenuity; for they have the air of being
written to fit a miscellaneous bagful of wood
engravings, that had been thrown hap-hazard