f Borrow had little consideration for others' feelings, his
consideration for his own was exquisite, as this story, belonging to
1856, may help to prove:

"There were three personages in the world whom he always had a desire to
see; two of these had slipped through his fingers, so he was determined
to see the third. 'Pray, Mr. Borrow, who were they?' He held up three
fingers of his left hand and pointed them off with the forefinger of the
right: the first, Daniel O'Connell; the second, Lamplighter (the sire of
Phosphorus, Lord Berners's winner of the Derby); the third, Anna
Gurney. . . ."

One spring day during the Crimean War, when he was walking round Norfolk,
he sent word to Anna Gurney to announce his coming, and she was ready to
receive him.

"When, according to his account, he had been but a very short time in her
presence, she wheeled her chair round and reached her hand to one of her
bookshelves and took down an Arabic Grammar, and put it into his hand,
asking for explanation of some difficult point, which he tried to
decipher; but meanwhile she talked to him continuously; when, said he, 'I
could not study the Arabic Grammar and listen to her at the same time, so
I threw down the book and ran out of the room.' He seems not to have
stopped running till he reached Old Tucker's Inn, at Cromer, where he
renewed his strength, or calmed his temper, with five excellent sausages,
and then came on to Sheringham. . . ." {210a}

The distance is a very good two miles, and Borrow's age was forty-nine.

He is said also to have been considerate towards his mother, the poor,
and domestic animals. Probably he and his mother understood one another.
When he could not write to her, he got his wife to do so; and from 1849
she lived with them at Oulton. As to the poor, Knapp tells us that he
left behind him letters of gratitude or acknowledgment from individuals,
churches, and chapels. As to animals, once when he came upon some men
beating a horse that had fallen, he gave it ale of sufficient quantity
and strength to set it soon upon the road trotting with the rest of its
kind, after the men had received a lecture. {210b} It is also related
that when a favourite old cat crawled out to die in the hedge he brought
it into the house, where he "laid it down in a comfortable spot and
watched it till it was dead." His horse, Sidi Habismilk, the Arab, seems
to have returned his admiration and esteem. He said himself, in "Wild