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Rh puir folk than just dinging down a sax-pence in the broad on the sabbath, and kilting, and scourging, and drumming them a' the six days o' the week besides."

Such was the gossip over the good two-penny in every ale-house within three or four miles of Ellangowan, that being about the diameter of the orbit in which our friend Godfrey Bertram, Esq. J. P. must be considered as the principal luminary. Still greater scope was given to evil tongues by the removal of a colony of gypsies, with one of whom our reader is somewhat acquainted, and who had for a great many years enjoyed their chief settlement upon the estate of Ellangowan.