imed: "Young fellow, I don't like your
way of speaking; no, nor your way of looking. You are mad, sir; you are
mad; and what's this? Why your hair is grey! You won't do for the
Honourable Company--they like red. I'm glad I didn't give you the
shilling." Then Borrow soliloquizes: "I shouldn't wonder if Mr.
Petulengro and Tawno Chikno came originally from India. I think I'll go
there." So ends one of the most amazing fragments of autobiography that
the world has ever seen; many readers we know leave these unwillingly and
return to them again and again with unquenchable zest. Borrow was
twenty-three when in the autumn of 1825 he was making his way to Norwich
from Lincolnshire, and from then till his employment by the Bible Society
in 1833, his movements were very uncertain. The intervening years have
been called "the veiled period"--gloomy and mysterious, says Mr. Jenkins,
but not utterly dark. He was in Norwich at Tombland Fair in April, 1827,
the real date of his doffing his hat to that celebrated horse, "Marshland
Shales," and towards the end of the year he was still in Willow Lane, as
is proved by entries in his mother's cash book, seen by Dr. Knapp.

Tired of inactivity, Borrow was in London in December, 1829, at 17, Great
Russell Street, W.C., eagerly seeking work, scheming for a work on the
Songs of Scandinavia, jointly with Bowring, which came to nothing.

It is curious that in a letter to Bowring of September 14th, 1830, he
proposes to call on him one evening, as early rising kills him. Quite a
strange expression for so open-air a wanderer. That Borrow could not
secure employment in the ordinary avenues of the professions and commerce
is hardly to be wondered at; he preferred the society of vagabonds, into
which he had been driven by his own inclinations as much as, or more
than, by force of circumstances. His brother John told him that his want
of success in life was more owing to his being unlike other people than
to any other cause. His isolating and aggressive pride engendered a
tactlessness which often spoilt any chances of advancement that came his
way. But he had dogged determination, which, to quote Mr. Jenkins, "was
to carry him through the most critical period of his life, enable him to
earn the approval of those in whose interests he worked, and eventually
achieve fame and an unassailable place in English literature."

It does not come within the scope of this local souvenir to follow Bor