es gathering
flowers, which, however, on our near approach, proved to be two tall
white towers, doubtless built for some purpose or other, though I did not
learn for what." He was at "the Protestant Academy" at Clonmel, and
"read the Latin tongue and the Greek letters with a nice old clergyman."
From a schoolfellow he learnt something of the Irish tongue in exchange
for a pack of cards.

School, he says, had helped him to cast aside, in a great degree, his
unsocial habits and natural reserve, and when he moved to Templemore,
where there was no school, he roamed about the wild country, "sometimes
entering the cabins of the peasantry with a 'God's blessing upon you good
people!'" Here, as in Scotland, he seems to have done as he liked. His
father had other things to do than look after the child whom he was later
on to upbraid for growing up in a displeasing way. Ireland made a strong
impression upon the boy, if we may judge from his writing about it when
he looked back on those days. He recalls, in "Wild Wales," hearing the
glorious tune of "Croppies lie Down" in the barrack yard at Clonmel.
Again and again he recalls Murtagh, the wild Irish boy who taught him
Irish for a pack of cards. In Ireland he learnt to be "a frank rider"
without a saddle, and had awakened in him his "passion for the equine
race": and here he had his cob shoed by a "fairy smith" who first roused
the animal to a frenzy by uttering a strange word "in a sharp pungent
tone," and then calmed it by another word "in a voice singularly modified
but sweet and almost plaintive." Above all there is a mystery which
might easily be called Celtic about his memories of Ireland, due chiefly
to something in his own blood, but also to the Irish atmosphere which
evoked that something in its perfection.

After less than a year in Ireland the regiment was back at Norwich, and
war being at an end, the men were mustered out in 1815.

{picture: Borrow's Court, Norwich. Photo: Jarrold & Sons, Norwich:
page61.jpg}

CHAPTER IX--SCHOOLDAYS

The Borrows now settled at Norwich in what was then King's Court and is
now Borrow's Court, off Willow Lane. George Borrow, therefore, again
attended the Grammar School of Norwich. He could then, he says, read
Greek. His father's dissatisfaction was apparently due to some
instinctive antipathy for the child, who had neither his hair nor his
eyes, but was "absolutely swarthy, God forgive me! I had almost said
like