r; and why not? for in spite of what I have heard
Father Toban say, I am by no means certain that all Protestants will be
damned.'

"'Farewell,' said I.

"'Farewell, your hanner, and long life and prosperity to you! God bless
your hanner and your Orange face. Ah, the Orange boys are the boys for
keeping faith. They never served me as Dan O'Connell and his dirty gang
of repalers and emancipators did. Farewell, your hanner, once more; and
here's another scratch of the illigant tune your hanner is so fond of, to
cheer up your hanner's ears upon your way.'

"And long after I had left him I could hear him playing on his fiddle in
first-rate style the beautiful tune of 'Down, down, Croppies Lie Down.'"

CHAPTER XXX--"WILD WALES" (_continued_)

Much more than in any of his other books Borrow is the hero in "Wild
Wales"--a strange black-coated gentleman with white hair striding over
the hills and along the rivers, carrying an umbrella, asking innumerable
questions and giving infinite information about history, literature,
religion, politics, and minor matters, willing to talk to anyone, but
determined not to put up at a trampers' hostelry. The Irish at Chester
took him for a minister, the Irish reapers in Anglesey took him for a
priest and got him to bless them in Latin while they knelt. All wondered
to hear the Saxon speaking or reading in Welsh. A man who could speak
Spanish addressed him in that language as a foreigner--"'I can't tell you
how it was, sir,' said he, looking me very innocently in the face, 'but I
was forced to speak Spanish to you.'" At Pentre Dwr the man with the
pigs heard his remarks on pigs and said: "I see you are in the trade and
understand a thing or two." The man on the road south to Tregaron told
him that he looked and spoke like the Earl of Leicester.

He reveals himself also without recourse to impartial men upon the road.
The mere figure of the tall man inquiring for the birthplaces of poets
and literally translating place names for their meaning, is very powerful
in holding the attention. He does not conceal his opinions. Some were
already familiar to readers of Borrow, his admiration for Smollett and
for Scott as a writer, his hate of gentility, Cavaliers, Papists, France,
sherry, and teetotalism. He had some bad ale in Wales, and he had some
Allsopp, which he declared good enough for the summer, and at Bala one of
his best Welshmen gave him the best of home-brewed, "rich