George Borrow was born in 1803 at another station of the regiment, East Dereham. He calls himself a gloomy child, a "lover of nooks and retired corners . . . sitting for hours together with my head on my breast . . . conscious of a peculiar heaviness within me, and at times of a strange sensation of fear, which occasionally amounted to horror, and for which I could assign no real cause whatever." A maidservant thought him a little wrong in the head, but a Jew pedlar rebuked her for saying so, and said the child had "all the look of one of our people's children," and praised his bright eyes. With the regiment he travelled along the Sussex and Kent coast during the next four years. They were at Pett in 1806, and there he tells us that he first handled a viper, fearless and unharmed. In 1806 also they were at Hythe, where he saw the skulls of the Danes. They were at Canterbury in 1807, and near there was the scene of his eating the "green, red, and purple" berries from the hedge and suffering convulsions. They were, says Dr. Knapp, from the regimental records, never at Winchester, but at Winchelsea. In 1809 and 1810 they were back at Dereham, which was then the home of Eleanor Fenn, his "Lady Bountiful," widow of the editor of the "Paston Letters," Sir John Fenn. He had "increased rapidly in size and in strength," but not in mind, and could read only imperfectly until "Robinson Crusoe" drew him out. He went to church twice on Sundays, and never heard God's name without a tremor, "for I now knew that God was an awful and inscrutable being, the maker of all things; that we were His children, and that we, by our sins, had justly offended Him; that we were in very great peril from His anger, not so much in this life as in another and far stranger state of being yet to come; that we had a Saviour withal to whom it was necessary to look for help: upon this point, however, I was yet very much in the dark, as, indeed, were most of those with whom I was connected. The power and terrors of God were uppermost in my thoughts; they fascinated though they astounded me." {picture: Borrow's birth-place, East Dereham, Norfolk. Photo: H. T. Cave, East Dereham: page57.jpg} Later in 1810 he was at Norman Cross, in Huntingdonshire, and was free to wander alone by Whittlesea Mere. There he met the old viper-hunter and herbalist, into whose mouth he puts the tale of the King of the Vipers. There he met the Gypsies. He answered their threats with a viper that had lain hid in his breast; they called him "Sapengro, a chap who catches snakes and plays tricks with them." He was sworn brother to Jasper, the son, who despised him for being puny.