breakfast at eight in Hereford Square, walk to Roehampton and pick up Mr.
Watts-Dunton or Mr. Hake, roam about Wimbledon Common and Richmond Park,
bathe in the Pen Ponds even if it were March and there were ice on the
water, then run about to dry, and after fasting for twelve hours would
eat a dinner at Roehampton "that would have done Sir Walter Scott's eyes
good to see." {314d} He loved Richmond Park, and "seemed to know every
tree." {314e} He loved also "The Bald-faced Stag," in Roehampton Valley,
and over his pot of ale would talk about Jerry Abershaw, the highwayman,
and his deeds performed in the neighbourhood. {314f} If he liked old
Burton and '37 port he was willing to drink the worst swipes if
necessary. {314g}

At another "Bald-faced Hind," above Fairlop, he used to see the Gypsies,
for it was their trysting place. He went in search of them in Wandsworth
and Battersea and whereever they were to be found, from Notting Hill to
Epsom Downs, though they were corrupted by loss of liberty and, in his
opinion, were destined soon to disappear, "merged in the dregs of the
English population." With them, as with others, his vocabulary was "rich
in picturesque words of the high road and dingle." Once he consented to
join a friend in trying Matthew Arnold's "Scholar Gypsy" on Gypsy taste.
The Gypsy girl was pleased with the seventeenth-century story on which
the poem is based, and with some "lovely bits of description," but she
was in the main at first bewildered, and at last unsympathetic and ran
away. The beauty of the girl was too much for Borrow's power of
expression--it was "really quite--quite--." The girl's companion, a
young woman with a child, was smoking a pipe, and Borrow took it out of
her mouth and asked her not to smoke till he came again, because the
child was sickly and his friend put it down to the tobacco. "It ought to
be a criminal offence for a woman to smoke at all," said Borrow; "fancy
kissing a woman's mouth that smelt of stale tobacco--pheugh!" {315}
Whether this proves Borrow's susceptibility to female charm I cannot say,
but it seems to me rather to prove a sort of connoisseurship, which is
not the same thing.

Just after he was seventy, in 1874, the year of Jasper Petulengro's
death, Borrow left London for Oulton. He was no longer the walker and
winter bather of a year or two before, but was frequently at lodgings in
Norwich, and seen and noted as he walked in the streets or sat in t