face, but the light comes back with the silvery gleaming of her winding rivers. When her lover leaves her, and wanders off to wooings far away, she reproaches him by her silence; and when he has time to think, he remembers with regret and longing the restful loveliness that was once about him like a mantle of peace. Flowering meads, wide-reaching marshland solitudes, lonely heaths and sandhills sloping downward to the sea; wildfowl-haunted shores and flats, rivers and lagoons through which the wherries glide, the calling of the herdman and the sighing of the sea-wind through bracken, gorse, and fir ridge—these are East Anglia, and, like voices heard in childhood, they are with her children wherever they may wander, until all earthly voices are for ever lost in silence. No one felt the charm of peaceful Eastern England more fully and deeply than did George Borrow. An East Anglian born, he was nurtured within the borders of Norfolk during many of the most impressionable years of his life, and when world-worn and weary, he sought rest from his wanderings, he came back to East Anglia to die. During his latter days, he became rather inaccessible; but an East Englishman always had a better chance of successfully approaching him than any one not so fortunate as to have been born within the compass of East Anglia. Mr. Theodore Watts discovered this when Borrow and he were the guests of Dr. Hake at Roehampton. “When I went on to tell him,” writes Mr. Watts, “that I once used to drive a genuine Shales mare, a descendant of that same famous Norfolk trotter who could trot fabulous miles an hour, to whom he, with the Norfolk farmers, raised his hat in reverence at the Norwich horse fair; and when I promised to show him a portrait of this same East Anglian mare with myself behind her in a dogcart—an East Anglian dogcart; when I praised the stinging saltness of the sea-water of Yarmouth, Lowestoft, and Cromer, the quality of which makes it the best, the most delightful of all sea-water to swim in; when I told him that the only English river in which you could see reflected the rainbow he loved was ‘the glassy Ouse’ of East Anglia, and the only place in England where you could see it reflected in the wet sand was the Norfolk coast; and when I told him a good many things showing that I was in very truth not only an Englishman but an East Englishman, my conquest of the ‘walking lord of gipsy lore’ was complete, and from that moment we became friends.” “It is on sand alone,” said Borrow, “that the sea strikes its true music—Norfolk sand.” “The best of the sea’s lutes,” chimed in the artful Watts, “is made by the sands of Cromer.” CHAPTER II: EARLY DAYS