desirable situation in London, owing to my
late connection with literature, I determined to remain where I was,
provided my services would be accepted. I offered them to the master,
who, finding I knew something of horses, engaged me as a postillion. I
have remained there since. You have now heard my story.

"Stay, you shan't say that I told my tale without a per--peroration. What
shall it be? Oh, I remember something which will serve for one! As I
was driving my chaise some weeks ago; I saw standing at the gate of an
avenue, which led up to an old mansion, a figure which I thought I
recognised. I looked at it attentively, and the figure, as I passed,
looked at me; whether it remembered me I do not know, but I recognised
the face it showed me full well.

"If it was not the identical face of the red-haired priest whom I had
seen at Rome, may I catch cold!

"Young gentleman, I will now take a spell on your blanket--young lady,
good night."

THE END. {437}

Footnotes:

{22} Greenwich.

{27a} Cf. French _chaperon_.

{27b} The Gentile's coming.

{27c} Gypsy fellows.

{33} Hearken, thimbla,
Comes a Gentile.

{35a} A meaningless verse.

{35b} Rather, _Okki tiro piomus_.

{36} Books.

{37} _Tatchi romadi_.

{38} Great City.

{39a} Meant for "ghost," but not real Anglo-Romany.

{39b} _Jerry_ Abershaw (_c._ 1773-95), a highwayman who haunted
Wimbledon Common, and was hanged on Kennington Common for shooting a
constable.

{43a} Thomas Blood (_c._ 1618-80). See T. Seccombe's _Lives of Twelve
Bad Men_ (1894).

{43b} In December 1670.

{63} ?Amesbury.

{65} The Avon.

{72a} The so-called (by Stukeley) "Vespasian's Ramparts."

{72b} Salisbury.

{87} This practice is not so uncommon. Dr. Johnson had a very similar
habit in his "sort of magical movement" (Life by Boswell, end of year
1764); and a member of my own college at Oxford, nearly thirty years ago,
touched just like the man in _Lavengro_. Once in the Schools he
remembered he had passed by a pebble which he had noticed in the High
Street: he tore up his papers, and went and picked up the pebble.

{88} Mr. William Bodham Donne, the examiner of plays 1857-74, was told
by Borrow himself that this "Man who Touched" was drawn from the author
of _Vathek_, William Beckford (1760-1844). There are difficulties in the
way of accepting this statement, among them that Beckford had quitted
Fonthill for Bath in 1822,