! How vivid and yet how strange are
the figures that animate them! The harsh literary impresario with his
"drug in the market," who seems to have stalked straight out of Smollett,
{8} the gnarled old applewoman, with every wrinkle shown, on her stall
upon London Bridge, the grasping Armenian merchant who softened at the
sound of his native tongue, the giddy young spendthrift Francis Ardry and
the confiding young creature who had permitted him to hire her a very
handsome floor in the West End, the gipsies and thimble-riggers in
Greenwich Park--what moving and lifelike figures are these, stippled in
with a seeming absence of art, yet as strange and as rare as a Night in
Bagdad, a chapter of Balzac, or the most fantastic scene in the _New
Arabian Nights_.

This brief recapitulation--in which it has been possible but just to
touch upon a few of the inner springs of Borrow's life as revealed in the
autobiographical _Lavengro_--brings us once again to that spring day in
1825--May 20th--when the author disposed of an unidentifiable manuscript
for the sumptuous equivalent of 20 pounds. On May 22nd, after little
more than a year's residence in London, he abandons the city. From
London he proceeds to Amesbury, in Wiltshire, which he reaches on May
23rd; visits Stonehenge, the Roman Camp of Old Sarum and Salisbury; on
May 26th he leaves Salisbury, and (after an encounter with the long-lost
son of the old applewoman, returned from Botany Bay), strikes north-west.
On the 30th he has been walking four days in a northerly direction, when
he arrives at the inn where the maid Jenny refreshes him at the pump, and
he meets the author with whom he passes the night. On the 31st he
purchases the horse and cart of Jack Slingsby, whom he had previously
seen but once, at Tamworth, many years ago when he was little more than a
child. On June 1st he makes the first practical experience of a
vagrant's life, and passes the night in the open air in a Shropshire
dell; on June 5th he is visited by Leonora Herne, the grandchild of the
old "brimstone hag" who was jealous of the cordiality with which the
young stranger had been received by the Petulengroes and initiated in the
secrets of their gipsy tribe. Three days later, betrayed to the old
woman by Leonora, he is drabbed (_i.e_. poisoned) with the manricli or
doctored cake of Mrs. Herne; his life is in imminent danger, but he is
saved by the opportune arrival of Peter Williams. He passes Sunda