tom
exclaim--

"'Brother, you are an arrant ring-maker and a horse-breaker; you'll make
a hempen ring to break your own neck of a horse one of these days.'

"They pressed their horses' flanks, again leaped over the ditches, and
speedily vanished, amidst the whirlwinds of dust which they raised upon
the road.

"The words of the phantom Gypsy were ominous. Gypsy Will was eventually
executed for a murder committed in his early youth, in company with two
English labourers, one of whom confessed the fact on his death-bed. He
was the head of the clan Young, which, with the clan Smith, still haunts
two of the eastern counties."

In spite of this, Borrow said in the same book that this would probably
be the last occasion he would have to speak of the Gypsies or anything
relating to them. In "The Bible in Spain," written and revised several
years later, he changed his mind. He wrote plenty about Gypsies and
still more about himself. When he wished to show the height of the
Spanish Prime Minister, Mendizabal, he called him "a huge athletic man,
somewhat taller than myself, who measure six feet two without my shoes."
He informed the public that when he met an immense dog in strolling round
the ruins above Monte Moro, he stooped till his chin nearly touched his
knee and looked the animal full in the face, "and, as John Leyden says,
in the noblest ballad which the Land of Heather has produced:--

'The hound he yowled, and back he fled,
As struck with fairy charm.'"

When his servant Lopez was imprisoned at Villallos, Borrow had reason to
fear that the man would be sacrificed to political opponents in that
violent time, so, as he told the English minister at Madrid, he bore off
Lopez, single-handed and entirely unarmed, through a crowd of at least
one hundred peasants, and furthermore shouted: "Hurrah for Isabella the
Second." And as for mystery, "The Bible in Spain" abounds with
invitations to admiration and curiosity. Let one example suffice. He
had come back to Seville from a walk in the country when a man emerging
from an archway looked in his face and started back, "exclaiming in the
purest and most melodious French: 'What do I see? If my eyes do not
deceive me--it is himself. Yes, the very same as I saw him first at
Bayonne; then long subsequently beneath the brick wall at Novgorod; then
beside the Bosphorus; and last at--at--O my respectable and cherished
friend, where was it that I had last the felicity