says he, and he took a great
fancy to it, "for it was a real beauty and I offered to _buy_, but
mistress would not _sell_, so I got another cock, and set the two a
fighting, and then off with my prize." This is like Mr. W. B. Yeats'
Paddy Cockfight in "Where there is nothing"; he got a fighting cock from
a man below Mullingar--"The first day I saw him I fastened my eyes on
him, he preyed on my mind, and next night if I didn't go back every foot
of nine miles to put him in my bag." When he was twelve he got drunk at
the Leith races and enlisted in the Norfolk Militia, which had a
recruiting party for patriots at the races. "I learned," he says, "to
beat the drum very well in the course of three months, and afterwards
made considerable progress in blowing the bugle-horn. I liked the red
coat and the soldiering well enough for a while, but soon tired. We were
too much confined, and there was too little pay for me;" and so he got
his discharge. "The restraining influences of military discipline," says
Dr. Knapp, "gradually wore away." He went back to school even, but in
vain. He was "never happier in his life" than when he "fingered all this
money"-- 200 pounds acquired by theft. He worked at his trade of
thieving in many parts of Scotland and Ireland. As early as 1818 he was
sentenced to death, but escaped, and, being recognised by a policeman,
killed him and got clear away. He served one or two sentences and
escaped from another. He escaped a third time, with a friend, after
hitting the gaoler in such a manner that he afterwards died. The friend
was caught at once, but David ran well--"never did a fox double the
hounds in better style"--and got away in woman's clothes. As he was
resting in a haystack after his run of ten miles in an hour, he heard a
woman ask "if that lad was taken that had broken out of Dumfries Gaol,"
and the answer: "No; but the gaoler died last night at ten o'clock." He
got arrested in Ireland through sheer carelessness, was recognised and
taken in irons to Dumfries again--and so he died.

In 1814 and 1815 Borrow was for a time at the Grammar School at Norwich,
but sailed with the regiment "in the autumn of the year 1815" for
Ireland. "On the eighth day of our voyage," he says, "we were in sight
of Ireland. The weather was now calm and serene, the sun shone brightly
on the sea and on certain green hills in the distance, on which I
descried what at first sight I believed to be two ladi