Borrow, much interested.

"I know the place that _was_ Whittlesea Mere before it was drained," I
said, "and I know the vipers around Norman Cross, and I think I know the
lane where you first met Jasper Petulengro. He was a generation before
my time. Indeed, I never was thrown much across the Petulengroes in the
Eastern Counties, but I knew some of the Hernes and the Lees and the
Lovells."

I then told him what I knew about Romanies and vipers, and also gave him
Marcianus's story about the Moors being invulnerable to the viper's bite,
and about their putting the true breed of a suspected child to the test
by setting it to grasp a viper--as he, Borrow, when a child, grasped one
of the vipers of Norman Cross.

"The gypsies," said Borrow, "always believed me to be a Romany. But
surely you are not a Romany Rye?"

"No," I said, "but I am a student of folk-lore; and besides, as it has
been my fortune to see every kind of life in England, high and low, I
could not entirely neglect the Romanies, could I?"

"I should think not," said Borrow, indignantly. "But I hope you don't
know the literary class among the rest."

"Hake is my only link to _that_ dark world," I said; "and even you don't
object to Hake. I am purer than he, purer than you, from the taint of
printers' ink."

He laughed. "Who are you?"

"The very question I have been asking myself ever since I was a child in
short frocks," I said, "and have never yet found an answer. But Hake
agrees with me that no well-bred soul should embarrass itself with any
such troublesome query." This gave a chance to Hake, who in such local
reminiscences as these had been able to take no part. The humorous
mystery of Man's personality had often been a subject of joke between him
and me in many a ramble in the Park and elsewhere. At once he threw
himself into a strain of whimsical philosophy which partly amused and
partly vexed Borrow, who stood waiting to return to the subject of the
gypsies and East Anglia.

"You are an Englishman?" said Borrow.

"Not only an Englishman, but an East Englishman," I said, using a phrase
of his own in "Lavengro"--"if not a thorough East Anglian an East
Midlander; who, you will admit, is nearly as good."

"Nearly," said Borrow.

And when I went on to tell him that I once used to drive a genuine
"Shales mare," a descendant of that same famous Norfolk trotter who could
trot fabulous miles an hour, to whom he with the Norfolk farmers rais