e gypsy cral
and his wife, and the gigantic Tawno, the Antinous of the dusky
people. And what was I myself? No longer an innocent child but
a moody man, bearing in my face, as I knew well, the marks of
my strivings and strugglings; of what I had learnt and
unlearnt.

But Borrow, as I have said, left Dereham in his eighth year, and the
author of a _History of East Dereham_ thus accounts for several
inaccuracies in his memory, both as to persons and things.

B. NORMAN CROSS AND AMBROSE SMITH.--In _Lavengro_ Borrow recalls
childish memories of Canterbury and of Hythe, at which latter place he
saw the church vault filled with ancient skulls as we may see it there
to-day. And after that the book which impressed itself most vividly upon
his memory was _Robinson Crusoe_. How much he came to revere Defoe the
pages of _Lavengro_ most eloquently reveal to us. 'Hail to thee, spirit
of Defoe! What does not my own poor self owe to thee?' In 1810-11 his
father was in the barracks at Norman Cross in Huntingdonshire. Here the
Government had bought a large tract of land, and built upon it a huge
wooden prison, and overlooking this a substantial barrack also of wood,
the only brick building on the land being the house of the Commandant.
The great building was destined for the soldiers taken prisoners in the
French wars. The place was constructed to hold 5000 prisoners, and 500
men were employed by the War Office in 1808 upon its construction. The
first batch of prisoners were the victims of the battle of Vimeiro in
that year. Borrow's description of the hardships of the prisoners has
been called in question by a later writer, Arthur Brown,[24] who denies
the story of bad food and 'straw-plait hunts,' and charges Borrow with
recklessness of statement. 'What could have been the matter with the man
to write such stuff as this?' asks Brown in reference to Borrow's story
of bad meat and bad bread: which was not treating a great author with
quite sufficient reverence. Borrow was but recalling memories of
childhood, a period when one swallow does make a summer. He had
doubtless seen examples of what he described, although it may not have
been the normal condition of things. Brown's own description of the
Norman Cross prison was interwoven with a love romance, in which a
French officer fell in love with a girl of the neighbouring village of
Yaxley, and after Waterloo returned to England and married her. When he
wrote h