ant, but also, and
especially after the end of the war, a painter, studying under B. R.
Haydon and old Crome. He went out to Mexico in the service of a mining
company in 1826, and died there in 1834.

George Borrow was born in 1803 at another station of the regiment, East
Dereham. He calls himself a gloomy child, a "lover of nooks and retired
corners . . . sitting for hours together with my head on my breast . . .
conscious of a peculiar heaviness within me, and at times of a strange
sensation of fear, which occasionally amounted to horror, and for which I
could assign no real cause whatever." A maidservant thought him a little
wrong in the head, but a Jew pedlar rebuked her for saying so, and said
the child had "all the look of one of our people's children," and praised
his bright eyes. With the regiment he travelled along the Sussex and
Kent coast during the next four years. They were at Pett in 1806, and
there he tells us that he first handled a viper, fearless and unharmed.
In 1806 also they were at Hythe, where he saw the skulls of the Danes.
They were at Canterbury in 1807, and near there was the scene of his
eating the "green, red, and purple" berries from the hedge and suffering
convulsions. They were, says Dr. Knapp, from the regimental records,
never at Winchester, but at Winchelsea. In 1809 and 1810 they were back
at Dereham, which was then the home of Eleanor Fenn, his "Lady
Bountiful," widow of the editor of the "Paston Letters," Sir John Fenn.
He had "increased rapidly in size and in strength," but not in mind, and
could read only imperfectly until "Robinson Crusoe" drew him out. He
went to church twice on Sundays, and never heard God's name without a
tremor, "for I now knew that God was an awful and inscrutable being, the
maker of all things; that we were His children, and that we, by our sins,
had justly offended Him; that we were in very great peril from His anger,
not so much in this life as in another and far stranger state of being
yet to come; that we had a Saviour withal to whom it was necessary to
look for help: upon this point, however, I was yet very much in the dark,
as, indeed, were most of those with whom I was connected. The power and
terrors of God were uppermost in my thoughts; they fascinated though they
astounded me."

{picture: Borrow's birth-place, East Dereham, Norfolk. Photo: H. T.
Cave, East Dereham: page57.jpg}

Later in 1810 he was at Norman Cross, in Huntingdonshire,