refore, that this episode is truthfully reported. Borrow
himself has made a comment on himself and women through the mouth of
Jasper. The Gypsy had overheard him talking to his sister Ursula for
three hours under a hedge, and his opinion was: "I begin to think you
care for nothing in this world but old words and strange stories." When,
afterwards, invited to kiss the same Ursula, he refused, "having," he
says, "inherited from nature a considerable fund of modesty, to which was
added no slight store acquired in the course of my Irish education,"
_i.e._ at the age of twelve.

After Isopel had gone he bought a fine horse with the help of a loan of
50 pounds from Jasper, and travelled with it across England, meeting
adventures and hearing of others. He was for a time bookkeeper at a
coaching inn, still with some pounds in his purse. At Horncastle, which
he mentions more than once by name, he sold the horse for 150 pounds. As
the fair at Horncastle lasted from the 11th to the 21st of August, the
date of this last adventure is almost exactly fixed. Here the book ends.

{picture: Horncastle Horse Fair. (From an old print.): page104.jpg}

CHAPTER XV--AN EARLY PORTRAIT

At the end of these travels Borrow had turned twenty-two. His brother
John painted his portrait, but it has disappeared, and Borrow himself, as
if fearing lest no adequate picture of him should remain, took pains to
leave the material for one. It is a peculiarity of his books that people
whom he meets and converses with often remark on his appearance. He must
himself have been tolerably familiar with it and used to comment on it.
He told his father that a lady thought him like Alfieri's Saul; at a
later date Haydon, the painter, said he would "make a capital Pharaoh."
Years before, when he was a boy, Petulengro recognised him after a long
absence, because there was something in his face to prevent people from
forgetting him. Mrs. Herne, his Gypsy enemy, praised him for his
"singular and outrageous ugliness." He was lean, long-limbed and tall,
having reached his full height of six-feet-two probably before the end of
his teens; he had plenty of room to fill before becoming a big man, and
yet he was already powerful and clearly destined to be a big man. His
hair had for some time been rapidly becoming grey, and was soon to be
altogether white: it had once been black, and his strongly-marked
eyebrows were still dark brown. His face was oval a