eep a
civil tongue in your head."

In 1778, when nineteen years of age, Thomas Borrow was articled for five
years to a maltster; but just as that period expired, at Menheniot Fair a
bicker arose in which Borrow and other young heroes triumphed over the
braves of that town. Constables appeared, but were promptly felled by
the brawny Borrow, and, to crown his misdeeds, he knocked over the
head-borough, who happened to be his maltster master. He wisely fled,
and shortly after enlisted as a private soldier in the Coldstream Guards,
and was soon quartered in London. In 1792, as a sergeant, he was
transferred to the West Norfolk Regiment of Militia, with headquarters at
East Dereham. A company of players from Norwich frequently visited that
nice little town, and in one of them appeared, as a supernumerary, Ann
Perfrement, the pretty daughter of a small farmer of Dumpling Green, on
the outskirts of the town. This maiden, of Huguenot descent, fascinated
the Cornish soldier, and the two were married at Dereham Church on
February 11th, 1793. The regiment was then about to start a wandering
course over the highways of England--at Colchester; in Norfolk; then at
Sheerness, Sandgate, and Dover; at Colchester once more; in Kent; Essex
again, and then, in 1802-3, at East Dereham, where George was born July
5th, 1803, in the house of his maternal grandparents. On July 17th he
was baptized George Henry, names of the king and of the eldest brother of
Captain Thomas Borrow.

[Picture: Plan of Dumpling Green, East Dereham. By permission of Mr.
Murray]

As a mere infant Borrow was gloomy and fond of solitude, "ever
conscious," he says, "of a peculiar heaviness within me, and at times of
a strange sensation of fear, which occasionally amounted to horror, and
for which I could assign no real cause whatever." Of this earliest
period he tells a characteristic story of drawing strange lines in the
dust with his fingers, when a Jew pedlar came up and said: "The child is
a sweet child, and he has all the look of one of our own people"; but
when he leaned forward to inspect the lines in the dust, "started back,
and grew white as a sheet; then, taking off his hat, he made some strange
gestures to me, cringing, chattering, . . . and shortly departed,
muttering something about 'holy letters,' and talking to himself in a
strange tongue." This, in the first chapter of "Lavengro," is in the
true Borrovian m