He was suffering from ill-health and untranquility of mind which gave his mother anxiety, though his physical strength appears not to have degenerated, for in 1853, at Yarmouth, he rescued a man out of a stormy sea. He was an unpleasant companion for those whom he did not like or could not get on with. Thackeray tried to get up a conversation with him, his final effort being the question, "Have you seen my 'Snob Papers' in 'Punch'?" To which Borrow answered: "In 'Punch'? It is a periodical I never look at." He once met Miss Agnes Strickland: "Borrow was unwilling to be introduced, but was prevailed on to submit. He sat down at her side; before long she spoke with rapture of his works, and asked his permission to send him a copy of her 'Queens of England.' He exclaimed, 'For God's sake, don't, madam, I should not know where to put them or what to do with them.' On this he rose, fuming, as was his wont when offended, and said to Mr. Donne, 'What a damned fool that woman is!' The fact is that, whenever Borrow was induced to do anything unwillingly, he lost his temper." {208} The friend who tells this story, Gordon Hake, a poet and doctor at Bury St. Edmunds, tells also that once when he was at dinner with a banker who had recently "struck the docket" to secure payment from a friend of Borrow's, and the banker's wife said to him: "Oh Mr. Borrow, I have read your books with so much pleasure!" the great man exclaimed: "Pray, what books do you mean, madam? Do you mean my account books?" How touchy he was, Mr. Walling shows, by his story of Borrow in Cornwall neglecting a lady all one evening because she bore the name of the man his father had knocked down at Menheniot Fair. Several stories of his crushing remarks prove nothing but that he was big and alarming and uncontrolled. {picture: Gordon Hake. From the painting by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. By kind permission of Mrs. George Gordon Hake: page209.jpg}