esently changed their
expression, and appeared to me to become prying and eagerly curious. He
at last arose, picked up his sword, sheathed it, and walked slowly to the
door, when there he stopped, turned round, advanced close to Francisco,
and looked him steadfastly in the face. 'My good fellow,' said he, 'I am
a Gypsy, and can read baji. Do you know where you will be this time to-
morrow?' {154} Then laughing like a hyena, he departed, and I never saw
him again.

"At that time on the morrow, Francisco was on his death-bed. He had
caught the jail fever, which had long raged in the Carcel de la Corte,
where I was imprisoned. In a few days he was buried, a mass of
corruption, in the Campo Santo of Madrid."

Having attracted the event, he recorded it with a vividness well set off
by his own nonchalance. Again and again he was to repeat this triumph of
depicting the wild, and the wild in a condition of activity and often
fury.

His success is all the greater because it is unexpected. He sets out "to
direct the attention of the public towards the Gypsies; but he hopes to
be able to do so without any romantic appeals on their behalf." He is
far from having a romantic tone. He wields, as a rule, with any amount
of dignity the massive style of the early Victorian "Quarterly Review"
and Lane's so-called "Arabian Nights." Thus, speaking of Gypsy fortune-
tellers, he says: "Their practice chiefly lies among females, the portion
of the human race most given to curiosity and credulity." Sentences like
this always remind me of Lord Melbourne's indignation at the thought of
religion intruding on private life. His indignation is obviously of the
same period as the sentence: "Among the Zingari are not a few who deal in
precious stones, and some who vend poisons; and the most remarkable
individual whom it has been my fortune to encounter amongst the Gypsies,
whether of the Eastern or Western world, was a person who dealt in both
these articles." A style like this resembles a paunchy man who can be
relied on not to pick the daisies. At times Borrow writes as if he were
translating, as in "The anvil rings beneath the thundering stroke, hour
succeeds hour, and still endures the hard sullen toil." He adds a little
vanity of no value by a Biblical echo now and again, as in the clause:
"And it came to pass, moreover, that the said Fajardo . . . " or in "And
the chief of that camp, even Mr. Petulengro, stood before the
encamp