The Romany Rye

ck in the bush was a piece of paper, but it's a magpie," next to the water- wagtail the gypsies' most famous bird. On going up to the bush they discovered a magpie crouched among the leaves. As it did not stir at their approach, Borrow's friend said to him: "It is wounded--or else dying--or is it a tame bird escaped from a cage?"

"Hawk!" said Borrow, laconically, and turned up his face and gazed into the sky. "The magpie is waiting till the hawk has caught his quarry and made his meal. I fancy he has himself been 'chivvied' by the hawk, as the gypsies would say."

And there, sure enough, beneath one of the silver clouds that specked the dazzling blue a hawk--one of the kind which takes its prey in the open rather than in the thick woodlands--was wheeling up and up, and trying its best to get above a poor little lark in order to stoop at and devour it. That the magpie had seen the hawk and had been a witness of the opening of the tragedy of the lark was evident, for in its dread of the common foe