'it is not Sas
you should call me--'tis Sassanach,' and forthwith I accompanied the word
with a speech full of flowers of Irish rhetoric.

"The man looked upon me for a moment, fixedly, then, bending his head
towards his breast, he appeared to be undergoing a kind of convulsion,
which was accompanied by a sound something resembling laughter; presently
he looked at me, and there was a broad grin on his features.

"'By my shoul, it's a thing of peace I'm thinking ye.'

"But now with a whisking sound came running down the road a hare; it was
nearly upon us before it perceived us; suddenly stopping short, however,
it sprang into the bog on the right-hand side; after it amain bounded the
dog of peace, followed by the man, but not until he had nodded to me a
farewell salutation. In a few moments I lost sight of him amidst the
snow-flakes."

This is more magical than nine-tenths of the deliberately Celtic prose or
verse. I mean that it is real and credible and yet insubstantial, the
too too solid flesh is melted into something like the mist over the
bogland, and it recalls to us times when an account of our physical self,
height, width, weight, colour, age, etc., would bear no relation whatever
to the true self. In part, this effect may be due to Ireland and to the
fact that Borrow was only there for one short impressionable year of his
boyhood, and had never seen any other country like it. But most of it is
due to Borrow's nature and the conditions under which the autobiography
was composed. While he was writing it he was probably living a more
solitary and sedentary life than ever before, and could hear the voices
of solitude; he was not the busy riding missionary of "The Bible in
Spain," nor the feted author, but the unsocial morbid tinker,
philologist, boxer, and religious doubter. It has been said that "he was
a Celt of Celts. His genius was truly Celtic." {218a} It has been said
that "he inherited nothing from Norfolk save his accent and his love of
'leg of mutton and turnips.'" {218b} Yet his father, the Cornish "Celt,"
appears to have been entirely unlike him, while he draws his mother, the
Norfolk Huguenot, as innately sympathetic with himself. I am content to
leave this mystery for Celts and anti-Celts to grow lean on. I have
known Celts who said that five and five were ten or, at most, eleven; and
Saxons who said twenty-five, and even fifty-five.

Borrow was writing without note books: things had ther