It was at
his initiative that, when he had returned to Oulton after the death of
his wife, his daughter and her husband came to live with him. He
declared that to live alone was no longer tolerable, and they gave up
their own home in London to join him at Oulton.

A new glimpse of Borrow on his domestic side has been offered to the
public even as this book is passing through the press. Mr. S. H.
Baldrey, a Norwich solicitor, has given his reminiscences of the author
of _Lavengro_ to the leading newspaper of that city.[256] Mr. Baldrey is
the stepson of the late John Pilgrim of the firm of Jay and Pilgrim, who
were Borrow's solicitors at Norwich in the later years of his life. One
at least of Mr. Baldrey's many reminiscences has in it an element of
romance; that in which he recalls Mrs. Borrow and her daughter:

Mrs. Borrow always struck me as a dear old creature. When
Borrow married her she was a widow with one daughter, Henrietta
Clarke. The old lady used to dress in black silk. She had
little silver-grey corkscrew curls down the side of her face;
and she wore a lace cap with a mauve ribbon on top, quite in
the Early Victorian style. I remember that on one occasion when
she and Miss Clarke had come to Brunswick House they were
talking with my mother in the temporary absence of George
Borrow, who, so far as I can recall, had gone into another room
to discuss business with John Pilgrim.

'Ah!' she said, 'George is a good man, but he is a strange
creature. Do you know he will say to me after breakfast,
"Mary, I am going for a walk," and then I do not see anything
more of him for three months. And all the time he will be
walking miles and miles. Once he went right into Scotland, and
never once slept in a house. He took not even a handbag with
him or a clean shirt, but lived just like any old tramp.'

Mr. Baldrey is clearly in error here, or shall we say that Mrs. Borrow
humorously exaggerated? We have seen that Borrow's annual holiday was a
matter of careful arrangement, and his knapsack or satchel is frequently
referred to in his descriptions of his various tours. But the matter is
of little importance, and Mr. Baldrey's pictures of Borrow are
excellent, including that of his personal appearance:

As I recall him, he was a fine, powerfully built man of about
six feet high. He had a clean-shaven face with a fresh
compl