In this passage Borrow concentrates upon one scene the feelings of three remote periods of his life. He gives the outward scene as he remembers it forty years after, and together with the thoughts which now come into his mind. He gives the romantic suggestion from one of the favourite ballads of his youth, "Elvir Hill." He gives the child himself weeping, he knows not why. Yet the passage is one and indivisible. These, at any rate, are not "lies--damned lies." CHAPTER II--HIS OWN HERO Borrow's principal study was himself, and in all his best books he is the chief subject and the chief object. Yet when he came to write confessedly and consecutively about himself he found it no easy task. Dr. Knapp gives an interesting account of the stages by which he approached and executed it. His first mature and original books, "The Zincali," or "The Gypsies of Spain," and "The Bible in Spain," had a solid body of subject matter more or less interesting in itself, and anyone with a pen could have made it acceptable to the public which desires information. "The Bible of Spain" was the book of the year 1843, read by everybody in one or other of the six editions published in the first twelve months. These books were also full of himself. Even "The Zincali," written for the most part in Spain, when he was a man of about thirty and had no reason for expecting the public to be interested in himself, especially in a Gypsy crowd--even that early book prophesied very different things. He said in the "preface" that he bore the Gypsies no ill-will, for he had known them "for upwards of twenty years, in various countries, and they never injured a hair of his head, or deprived him of a shred of his raiment." The motive for this forbearance, he said, was that they thought him a Gypsy. In his "introduction" he satisfied some curiosity, but raised still more, when speaking of the English Gypsies and especially of their eminence "in those disgraceful and brutalising exhibitions called pugilistic combats."