d at Christmas time in 1853. He stayed for a fortnight with a
cousin's married daughter, Mrs. Anne Taylor, at Penquite Farm, near
Liskeard, and then several days again after a fortnight spent on a walk
to Land's End and back. In his last week he walked to Tintagel and
Pentire. He was welcomed with hospitality and admiration. He in turn
seems to have been pleased and at his ease, though he only understood
half of what was said. Those who remember his visit speak of his tears
in the house where his father was born, of his sitting in the centre of a
group telling stories of his travels and singing a Gypsy song, of his
singing foreign songs all day out of doors, of his fit of melancholy
cured by Scotch and Irish airs played on the piano, of his violent
opinions on sherry and "Uncle Tom's Cabin," of his protesting against
some sign of gentility by using a filthy rag as a pocket handkerchief,
and that in a conspicuous manner, of his being vain and not proud, of his
telling the children stories, of one child crying out at sight of him:
"That _is_ a man!" He made his mark by unusual ways and by intellectual
superiority to his rustic cousins. He rode about with one of his
cousin's grandchildren. He walked hither and thither alone, doing as
much as twenty-five miles a day with the help of "Look out, look out,
Svend Vonved," which he sang in the last dark stretches of road. Mr.
Walling was "told that he roamed the Caradons in all weathers without a
hat, in search of sport and specimens, antiquities and dialects," but I
should think the "specimens" were for the table. He talked to the men by
the wayside or dived into the slums of Liskeard for disreputable
characters. He visited remarkable and famous places, and was delighted
with "Druidic" remains and tales of fairies.

Thus Borrow made "fifty quarto pages" of notes, says Knapp, about people,
places, dialect, and folk lore. Some of the notes are mere shorthand;
some are rapid gossipy jottings; and they include; a verse translation of
a Cornish tale.

A book on Cornwall, to have grown out of these notes, was advertised; but
it was never written. Perhaps he found it hard to vivify or integrate
his notes. In any case there could hardly have been any backbone to the
book, and it would have been tourist's work, however good. He was not a
man who wrote about everything; the impulse was lacking and he went on
with the furious Appendix to "The Romany Rye."

In 1854 he paid