Théophile Gautier's "Carmen." From George Borrow to Mary Garden (_Histoire sommaire de Carmen_) Alice, it will be recalled, adventured into Wonderland bearing a morsel of mushroom in each hand; now she munched one piece, which made her grow tall, now the other, which diminished her height. In this manner she adjusted her size to that of the various doorways and gates of the place as well as to that of the creatures she encountered. In somewhat the same fashion George Borrow, sent by the British Bible Society to distribute the Holy Word in the papalized peninsula, advanced into Spain. In one hand he held a Castilian version of the New Testament; in the other his very considerable curiosity. Doubtless he made many valiant attempts to hawk Bibles, but it is quite as certain that he never restrained his natural aptitude for the companionship of thieves, gitanos, contrabandists, and bandits. More than once his zeal in behalf of the Scriptures landed him in jail, but I can scarcely accept this as proof of his devotion to a holy cause when I remember that he had been attempting in vain to persuade certain Madrid officials to permit him to voluntarily incarcerate himself so that he might have such further opportunities for the pursuit of his studies of the "crabbed gitano" as intercourse with the prisoners might offer. As a matter of fact when he was arrested the English Ambassador secured his pardon before the day was done, but this Borrow refused to consider. He was in jail and he proposed to remain there, and remain he did, a matter of several weeks, during which period he had lengthy talks with all the prisoners, adding substantially to his foreign vocabularies.... His sympathy, indeed, was with the gitanos; he ate and drank and slept with them, sometimes in stables, sometimes in dirty lofts. If he himself did not connive at the "affairs of Egypt," at least he travelled with those who did; if he did not assist at robberies or murders, he was often aware that they were about to be committed. On one occasion he held converse, which is delightfully recorded, with Sevilla, the picador, whom Prosper Mérimée met and who is referred to in Richard Ford's "Gatherings from Spain."... We must, on the whole, thank the British Bible Society for giving Borrow the opportunity to write two strangely charming books, one of them a masterpiece, but over what Borrow did for the Bible Society it is perhaps just as well to draw a shade.