to the dingle, Isopel Berners had quitted it, never to return. She ran away to the nearest sea-port, and took shipping to America. Lavengro with some anguish steeled his heart against following her. The scene of these transactions was a wooded glen or dingle a few miles from Willenhall, in Staffordshire, where Lavengro and Isopel were encamped in their respective tents, having as their neighbours the gipsy clan of which Jasper was the chief. Upon the whole the Dingle chapters are perhaps the most brilliant and the most enduring that Borrow ever achieved. Their interest is greatly enhanced by the fact that they are probably a naked transcript from actual fact, for Borrow was a poor hand at invention. He rarely, if ever, invented a character. His surest source of inspiration was the unadorned truth. After the experience of a summer in the open, Borrow, who was now twenty-two, relapsed into the indifferent versification of Danish ballads and Welsh bards, was severely fleeced in obscure journeyings in Southern Europe, and so gained some experience for future use, vainly sought a post, on the strength of his linguistic attainments, as an assistant in the British Museum Library, and was reduced to writing reactionary political leaders for a Norwich paper; he was, in fact, waiting, like Mr. Micawber, for something to turn up, or, in his own graphic phrase, “digging holes in the sand and filling them up again.” His deliverance was effected in rather a singular manner. About 1833 he became acquainted with the Skeppers of Oulton Hall, in that pleasant stretch of country which borders on the river Waveney. By Mrs. Clarke (afterwards Mrs. Borrow), the widowed sister of the owner of the Hall, he was introduced to the Rev. Francis Cunningham, rector of Pakefield, a fine type of the Evangelical clergyman of a past generation, who had married the sister of Joseph John Gurney. It seemed to this good man that Borrow’s gift of tongues might well be employed in the service of the Bible Society, of which the famous Norfolk Quaker was an influential member. The hour of the former would-be martyr to infidelity had now come; he was taken into the regular service of the society upon an average salary of about £250, in addition to expenses, and was employed as editor, translator, and colporteur of Bibles in strange lands. The labours of the next eight years of his life were as fruitful and honourable as those of the preceding eight had been desultory and obscure. His first commission was to go to St. Petersburg and there edit and superintend the setting up and printing of Lipóftsof’s version of the New Testament into Manchu. Borrow acquired the language and performed his task with an almost incredible expedition. He also learned Russian, and in the summer of 1835 proposed to the society that he should himself distribute the work which he had seen through the press upon the confines of the Far East. This scheme was scotched by the refusal of the Russian