For an introduction to him at last I was indebted to Dr. Gordon Hake, the poet, who had known Borrow for many years, and whose friendship Borrow cherished above most things—as was usual, indeed, with the friends of Dr. Hake. This was done with some difficulty, for, in calling at Roehampton for a walk through Richmond Park and about the Common, Borrow’s first question was always, “Are you alone?” and no persuasion could induce him to stay unless it could be satisfactorily shown that he would not be “pestered by strangers.” On a certain morning, however, he called, and suddenly coming upon me, there was no retreating, and we were introduced. He tried to be as civil as possible, but evidently he was much annoyed. Yet there was something in the very tone of his voice that drew my heart to him, for to me he was the Lavengro of my boyhood still. My own shyness had been long before fingered off by the rough handling of the world, but his retained all the bloom of youth, and a terrible barrier it was, yet I attacked it manfully. I knew that Borrow had read but little except in his own out-of-the-way directions; but then unfortunately, like all specialists, he considered that in these his own special directions lay all the knowledge that was of any value. Accordingly, what appeared to Borrow as the most striking characteristic of the present age was its ignorance. Unfortunately, too, I knew that for strangers to talk of his own published books or of gipsies appeared to him to be “prying,” though there I should have been quite at home. I knew, however, that in the obscure English pamphlet literature of the last century, recording the sayings and doings of eccentric people and strange adventurers, Borrow was very learned, and I too chanced to be far from ignorant in that direction. I touched on Bamfylde Moore Carew, but without effect. Borrow evidently considered that every properly educated man was familiar with the story of Bamfylde Moore Carew in its every detail. Then I touched upon beer, the British bruiser, “gentility-nonsense,” the “trumpery great”; then upon etymology, traced hoity-toityism to _toit_, a roof,—but only to have my shallow philology dismissed with a withering smile. I tried other subjects in the same direction, but with small success, till in a lucky moment I bethought myself of Ambrose Gwinett. There is a very scarce eighteenth-century pamphlet narrating the story of Ambrose Gwinett, the man who, after having been hanged and gibbeted for murdering a traveller with whom he had shared a double-bedded room at a seaside inn, revived in the night, escaped from the gibbet irons, went to sea as a common sailor, and afterwards met on a British man-of-war the very man he had been hanged for murdering. The truth was that Gwinett’s supposed victim, having been attacked on the night in question by a violent bleeding at the nose, had risen and left the house for a few