As a mere infant Borrow was gloomy and fond of solitude, "ever conscious," he says, "of a peculiar heaviness within me, and at times of a strange sensation of fear, which occasionally amounted to horror, and for which I could assign no real cause whatever." Of this earliest period he tells a characteristic story of drawing strange lines in the dust with his fingers, when a Jew pedlar came up and said: "The child is a sweet child, and he has all the look of one of our own people"; but when he leaned forward to inspect the lines in the dust, "started back, and grew white as a sheet; then, taking off his hat, he made some strange gestures to me, cringing, chattering, . . . and shortly departed, muttering something about 'holy letters,' and talking to himself in a strange tongue." This, in the first chapter of "Lavengro," is in the true Borrovian mystery-man style. [Picture: George Borrow's birthplace, Dumpling Green, East Dereham] Again and again Borrow, throughout his life, suffered from some nervous ailment which defied definition; thus, when he was fifteen, his strength and appetite deserted him and he pined and drooped, but an ancient female, a kind of doctress, who had been his nurse in his infancy, gave him a decoction of a bitter root growing on commons and desolate places, from which he took draughts till he was convalescent. In any estimate of Borrow's life the strange attacks of what he called "the Fear" or "the Horrors" must be taken into account. At times they even produced a suicidal tendency, as when, in 1824, he wrote to his friend Roger Kerrison, "Come to me immediately; I am, I believe, dying." The facsimile of this note in Knapp's "Life of Borrow" is as tremulous as if the writer was suffering from delirium tremens, which, of course, he was not. [Picture: Roger Kerrison] We have in "Lavengro" a very interesting account of the boy Borrow being taken twice every Sunday to the fine parish church at East Dereham, where, from a corner of a spacious pew, he would fix his eyes on the dignified high-Church rector and the dignified high-Church clerk, "from whose lips would roll many a portentous word descriptive of the wondrous works of the Most High." The rector was the Rev. F. J. H. Wollaston, B.D., who was himself patron of the living, which reverted to the Crown in 1841. At East Dereham, too, he came in touch with that exquisite old gentlewoman, Lady Fenn, widow of Sir John Fenn, editor of the "Paston Letters," as she passed to and fro from her mansion on some errand of bounty or of mercy, leaning on her gold-headed cane, whilst the sleek old footman walked at a respectful distance behind. But Borrow's admiration for Philo, the clerk, was greatest--"Peace to thee, thou fine old chap, despiser of dissenters, and hater of papists, as became a dignified and high-Church clerk."