aughter to set sail for Spain, where Mary had had the
indefatigable and sympathetic correspondent during the previous year of
trouble. Borrow and Mary Clarke met, as we have seen, at Seville and
there, at a later period, they became 'engaged.' Mrs. Clarke and her
daughter Henrietta sailed for Spain in the _Royal Tar_, leaving London
for Cadiz in June 1839. Much keen correspondence between Borrow and Mrs.
Clarke had passed before the final decision to visit Spain. His mother
was one of the few people who knew of Mrs. Clarke's journey to Seville,
and must have understood, as mothers do, what was pending, although her
son did not When the engagement is announced to her--in November
1839--she writes to Mary Clarke a kindly, affectionate letter:

I shall now resign him to your care, and may you love and
cherish him as much as I have done. I hope and trust that each
will try to make the other happy.

There is no reason whatever to accept Dr. Knapp's suggestion,[141]
strange as coming from so pronounced a hero-worshipper, that Borrow
married for money. And this because he had said in one of his letters,
'It is better to suffer the halter than the yoke,' the kind of thing
that a man might easily say on the eve of making a proposal which he was
not sure would be accepted. Nor can Dr. Knapp's further discovery of a
casual remark of Borrow's--'marriage is by far the best way of getting
possession of an estate'--be counted as conclusive. That Borrow was all
his life devoted to his wife I think is proved by his many letters to
her that are given in this volume, letters, however, which Dr. Knapp had
not seen. Borrow's further tribute to his wife and stepdaughter in _Wild
Wales_ is well known:

Of my wife I will merely say that she is a perfect paragon of
wives, can make puddings and sweets and treacle posset, and is
the best woman of business in Eastern Anglia. Of my
stepdaughter--for such she is, though I generally call her
daughter, and with good reason, seeing that she has always
shown herself a daughter to me--that she has all kinds of good
qualities, and several accomplishments, knowing something of
conchology, more of botany, drawing capitally in the Dutch
style, and playing remarkably well on the guitar--not the
trumpery German thing so called, but the real Spanish guitar.

Borrow belonged to the type of men who would never marry did not some
woman mercifully