ough the mother's excessive love of her pipe can very
appropriately be introduced here, and I am glad that Mr. Hake has
recalled it to my mind. It shows not only Borrow's relations to
childhood, but also his susceptibility to those charms of womankind to
which Dr. Jessopp thinks he was impervious. Borrow was fond of telling
this story himself, in support of his anti-tobacco bias. Whenever he was
told, as he sometimes was, that what brought on the "horrors" when he
lived alone in the dingle, was the want of tobacco, this story was
certain to come up.

One lovely morning in the late summer, just before the trees were clothed
with what is called "gypsy gold," and the bright green of the foliage
showed scarcely a touch of bronze--at that very moment, indeed, when the
spirits of all the wild flowers that have left the common and the
hedgerow seem to come back for an hour and mingle their half-forgotten
perfumes with the new breath of calamint, ground-ivy, and pimpernel, he
and a friend were walking towards a certain camp of gryengroes well known
to them both. They were bound upon a quaint expedition. Will the reader
"be surprised to learn" that it was connected with Matthew Arnold and a
race in which he took a good deal of interest, the gypsies?

Borrow, whose attention had been only lately directed by his friend to
"The Scholar Gypsy," had declared that there was scarcely any latter-day
poetry worth reading, and also that whatever the merits of Matthew
Arnold's poem might be from any supposed artistic point of view, it
showed that Arnold had no conception of the Romany temper, and that no
gypsy who ever lived could sympathise with it, or even understand its
motive in the least degree. Borrow's friend had challenged this,
contending that howsoever Arnold's classic language might soar above a
gypsy's intelligence, the motive was so clearly developed that the most
illiterate person could grasp it. This was why in company with Borrow he
was now going (with a copy of Arnold's poems in his pocket) to try "The
Scholar Gypsy" upon the first intelligent gypsy woman they should meet at
the camp: as to gypsy men, "they were," said Borrow, "too prosaic to
furnish a fair test."

As they were walking along, Borrow's eyes, which were as long-sighted as
a gypsy's, perceived a white speck in a twisted old hawthorn bush some
distance off. He stopped and said: "At first I thought that white speck
in the bush was a piece of paper, bu