“I know the place that _was_ Whittlesea Mere before it was drained,” I said, “and I know the vipers around Norman Cross, and I think I know the lane where you first met Jasper Petulengro. He was a generation before my time. Indeed, I never was thrown much across the Petulengroes in the Eastern Counties, but I knew some of the Hernes and the Lees and the Lovells.” I then told him what I knew about Romanies and vipers, and also gave him Marcianus’s story about the Moors being invulnerable to the viper’s bite, and about their putting the true breed of a suspected child to the test by setting it to grasp a viper—as he, Borrow, when a child, grasped one of the vipers of Norman Cross. “The gypsies,” said Borrow, “always believed me to be a Romany. But surely you are not a Romany Rye?” “No,” I said, “but I am a student of folk-lore; and besides, as it has been my fortune to see every kind of life in England, high and low, I could not entirely neglect the Romanies, could I?” “I should think not,” said Borrow, indignantly. “But I hope you don’t know the literary class among the rest.” “Hake is my only link to _that_ dark world,” I said; “and even you don’t object to Hake. I am purer than he, purer than you, from the taint of printers’ ink.” He laughed. “Who are you?” “The very question I have been asking myself ever since I was a child in short frocks,” I said, “and have never yet found an answer. But Hake agrees with me that no well-bred soul should embarrass itself with any such troublesome query.” This gave a chance to Hake, who in such local reminiscences as these had been able to take no part. The humorous mystery of Man’s personality had often been a subject of joke between him and me in many a ramble in the Park and elsewhere. At once he threw himself into a strain of whimsical philosophy which partly amused and partly vexed Borrow, who stood waiting to return to the subject of the gypsies and East Anglia. “You are an Englishman?” said Borrow. “Not only an Englishman, but an East Englishman,” I said, using a phrase of his own in “Lavengro”—“if not a thorough East Anglian an East Midlander; who, you will admit, is nearly as good.” “Nearly,” said Borrow.