r man such
a morsel before! It was a symptom of insanity in the dean, and I believe
he is since dead, insane." It was after this interview with the countess
that we visited Old Boston, and when my parents told old Mr. Porter
about the missal his jolly eyes took on a far-away expression, as if he
saw himself in the delightful act of purloining it, "in obedience to a
higher law than that which he broke."

The man who, of all writing men, was nearest to my heart in those years,
and long after, was George Borrow, whose book, Lavengro, I had already
begun to read. The publication of this work had made him famous, though
he had written two or three volumes before that, and was at this
very time bringing out its sequel, Romany Rye. But Borrow was never a
hanger-on of British society, and we never saw him. One day, however,
Mr. Martineau turned up, and, the conversation chancing to turn on
Borrow, he said that he and George had been school-mates, and that the
latter's gypsy proclivities had given him a singular influence over
other boys. Finally, he had persuaded half a dozen of them to run away
from the school and lead a life of freedom and adventure on the roads
and lanes of England. To this part of Mr. Martineau's tale I lent an
eager and sympathetic ear; but the narrator was lowered in my estimation
by the confession that he himself had not been a member of Borrow's
party. He went on to say that the fugitives had been pursued and
captured and brought back to bondage; and upon Borrow's admitting that
he had been the instigator of the adventure, he was sentenced to be
flogged, and that it was on the back of this very Martineau that he
had been "horsed" to undergo the punishment! Imagine the great, wild,
mysterious Borrow mounted upon the ascetic and precise cleric that
was to be, and the pedagogue laying on! My father asked concerning the
accuracy of some of Borrow's statements in his books, to which Martineau
replied that he could not be entirely depended on; not that he meant to
mislead or misrepresent, but his imagination, or some eccentricity in
his mental equipment, caused him occasionally to depart from literal
fact. Very possibly; but Borrow's imagination brought him much nearer to
essential truth than adherence to what they supposed to be literal facts
could bring most men.

One of the most interesting expeditions of this epoch--though I cannot
fix the exact date--was to an old English country-seat, built in the
tim