, stood on the side of a slight rising bank
overlooking Oulton Broad, and was sheltered from the winds of the sea and
marshland by a belt of storm-rent pines. The house contained a
sitting-room on either side of the entrance-hall, a kitchen, four
bedrooms, and two attics. It was its smallness and compactness that
commended it to Borrow, and it also had the extra recommendation to a man
of his disposition of being quiet and secluded. Indeed, so
out-of-the-way was its situation that to take a boat upon the broad was
looked upon as the best and most direct means of attaining this isolated
nook of the Broadland.

At the present time the broad, that stretches away from Lake Lothing to
the westward of Borrow's Ham, {45} is for several months of the year
picturesque with the white sails of yachts and other pleasure boats that
have skimmed its placid waters since the Broadland first became a holiday
resort. In the early days of Borrow's residence at Oulton, the only
craft that stirred its sunlit ripples were the punts of the eel-catcher
and wildfowl-seeker and the slowly gliding wherries voyaging to and from
the coast and inland towns. To-day, a little colony of dwellers in
red-brick villas have invaded the lonely spot where Borrow lived; but
even now you have but to turn aside a few steps from the lake side to
reach the edge of far-stretching marshland levels that have changed their
face but little during the passage of many centuries. Farther away the
marshlanders have seized upon any slight piece of rising ground to
establish a firm foundation for their humble homes; here and there a grey
church tower or skeleton windmill breaks the line of the level horizon.
The meres and marshes have the silence of long dead years resting upon
them, save where the breeze stirs the riverside reeds or a curlew cries
above the ooze flats.

Queer company the "walking lord of gipsy lore" must have kept as he sat
alone in that little book-lined summer-house, hearing strange voices in
the sighing of the wind through the fir-trees and the distant sobbing of
the sea. Out of the shadow of the past there would come to him, not only
the swarthy Romanies, but Francis Ardrey, the friend of his youth; the
Armenian merchant, with whom Lavengro discussed Haik; the victim of the
evil chance, who talked nonsense about the _star_ Jupiter and told him
that "touching" story of his fight against destiny; the Rev. Mr.
Platitude, who would neither admit th