ed
his hat in reverence at the Norwich horse fair, and when I promised to
show him a portrait of this same East Anglian mare with myself behind her
in a dogcart--an East Anglian dogcart--when I praised the stinging
saltness of the sea water off Yarmouth, Lowestoft, and Cromer, the
quality which makes it the best, the most buoyant, the most delightful of
all sea water to swim in--when I told him that the only English river in
which you could see reflected the rainbow he loved was "the glassy Ouse"
of East Anglia, and the only place in England where you could see it
reflected in the wet sand was the Norfolk coast, and when I told him a
good many things showing that I was in very truth not only an Englishman,
but an East Englishman, my conquest of the "Walking Lord of Gypsy Lore"
was complete, and from that moment we became friends.

Hake meanwhile stood listening to the rooks in the distance. He turned
and asked Borrow whether he had never noticed a similarity between the
kind of muffled rattling roar made by the sea-waves upon a distant pebbly
beach and the sound of a large rookery in the distance.

"It is on _sand_ alone," said Borrow, "that the sea strikes its true
music--Norfolk sand: a rattle is not music."

"The best of the sea's lutes," I said, "is made by the sands of Cromer."

I have read over to my beloved old friend Dr. Hake, the above meagre
account of that my first delightful ramble with Borrow. He whose memory
lets nothing escape, has reminded me of a score of interesting things
said and done on that memorable occasion. But in putting into print any
record of one's intercourse with a famous man, there is always an
unpleasant sense of lapsing into egotism. And besides, the reader has
very likely had enough now of talk between Borrow and me.

X. THE FUTURE OF BORROW'S WORKS.

He whom London once tried hard, but in vain, to lionise, lived during
some of the last years of his life in Hereford Square, unknown to any
save about a dozen friends. At the head of them stood Mr. John Murray,
whose virtues, both as publisher and as English gentleman, he was never
tired of extolling.

Afterwards he went down to East Anglia--that East Anglia he loved so
well--went there, as he told me, to die.

But it was not till one day in 1881 that Borrow achieved, in the Cottage
by the Oulton Broads which his genius once made famous, and where so much
of his best work had been written, the soul's great conquest ove