y, June
12th, with the Welsh preacher and his wife Winifred; on the 21st he
departs with his itinerant hosts to the Welsh border. Before entering
Wales, however, he turns back with Ambrose ("Jasper") Petulengro and
settles with his own stock-in-trade as tinker and blacksmith at the foot
of the dingle hard by Mumper's Lane, near Willenhall, in Staffordshire;
here at the end of June 1825 takes place the classical encounter between
the philologer and the flaming tinman--all this, is it not related in
_Lavengro_, and substantiated with much hard labour of facts and dates by
Dr. W. I. Knapp in his exhaustive biography of George Borrow? The
allurement of his genius is such that the etymologist shall leave his
roots and the philologer his Maeso-Gothic to take to the highway and
dwell in the dingle with "Don Jorge."

Lavengro's triumph over the flaming tinman is the prelude to what
Professor Saintsbury justly calls "the miraculous episode of Ysopel
Berners," and the narrative of the author's life is thence continued,
with many digressions, but with a remarkable fidelity to fact as far as
the main issue is concerned, until the narrative, though not the life-
story of the author, abruptly terminates at Horncastle, in August 1825.
There follows what is spoken of as the veiled period of Borrow's life,
from 1826 to 1833.

The years in which we drift are generally veiled from posterity. The
system of psychometry carried to such perfection by Obermann and Amiel
could at no time have been exactly congenial to Borrow, who spoke of
himself at this period as "digging holes in the sand and filling them up
again." Roughly speaking, the years appear to have been spent
comparatively uneventfully, for the most part in Norfolk. In December
1832 he walked to London to interview the British and Foreign Bible
Society, covering a hundred and twelve miles in twenty-seven hours on
less than sixpennyworth of food and drink. He was thirty years old at
the time, and the achievement was the pride of his remaining years. Six
months later, on the strength of his linguistic attainments, he managed
to get on the paid staff of the Society, to the bewilderment of Norwich
"friends," who were inclined to be ironical on the subject of the
transformation of the chum of hanged Thurtell and the disciple of godless
Billy Taylor into a Bible missionary. In July 1833, then, Borrow sets
out on his Eastern travels as the accredited agent of the Bible Society,
g