It is much to be hoped that the Borrow Celebration, to which this booklet is a modest contribution, may lead to a warmer appreciation in Norwich of one of the greatest men who ever trod her streets. "The Romany Rye" has a thoroughly Borrovian ending, much in the manner of Sterne, as many of Borrow's passages are. His pilgrimage of tinkering and adventurous vagrancy between May and August, 1825, came to an end at Boston--"a large town, situate at the entrance of an extensive firth"--where a recruiting sergeant wished to enlist him for the service of the Honourable East India Company. But his references to Petulengro and Tawno Chikno disgusted the soldier, who exclaimed: "Young fellow, I don't like your way of speaking; no, nor your way of looking. You are mad, sir; you are mad; and what's this? Why your hair is grey! You won't do for the Honourable Company--they like red. I'm glad I didn't give you the shilling." Then Borrow soliloquizes: "I shouldn't wonder if Mr. Petulengro and Tawno Chikno came originally from India. I think I'll go there." So ends one of the most amazing fragments of autobiography that the world has ever seen; many readers we know leave these unwillingly and return to them again and again with unquenchable zest. Borrow was twenty-three when in the autumn of 1825 he was making his way to Norwich from Lincolnshire, and from then till his employment by the Bible Society in 1833, his movements were very uncertain. The intervening years have been called "the veiled period"--gloomy and mysterious, says Mr. Jenkins, but not utterly dark. He was in Norwich at Tombland Fair in April, 1827, the real date of his doffing his hat to that celebrated horse, "Marshland Shales," and towards the end of the year he was still in Willow Lane, as is proved by entries in his mother's cash book, seen by Dr. Knapp. Tired of inactivity, Borrow was in London in December, 1829, at 17, Great Russell Street, W.C., eagerly seeking work, scheming for a work on the Songs of Scandinavia, jointly with Bowring, which came to nothing.