for the sumptuous equivalent of 20 pounds. On May 22nd, after little
more than a year's residence in London, he abandons the city. From
London he proceeds to Amesbury, in Wiltshire, which he reaches on May
23rd; visits Stonehenge, the Roman Camp of Old Sarum and Salisbury; on
May 26th he leaves Salisbury, and (after an encounter with the long-lost
son of the old applewoman, returned from Botany Bay), strikes north-west.
On the 30th he has been walking four days in a northerly direction, when
he arrives at the inn where the maid Jenny refreshes him at the pump, and
he meets the author with whom he passes the night. On the 31st he
purchases the horse and cart of Jack Slingsby, whom he had previously
seen but once, at Tamworth, many years ago when he was little more than a
child. On June 1st he makes the first practical experience of a
vagrant's life, and passes the night in the open air in a Shropshire
dell; on June 5th he is visited by Leonora Herne, the grandchild of the
old "brimstone hag" who was jealous of the cordiality with which the
young stranger had been received by the Petulengroes and initiated in the
secrets of their gipsy tribe. Three days later, betrayed to the old
woman by Leonora, he is drabbed (_i.e_. poisoned) with the manricli or
doctored cake of Mrs. Herne; his life is in imminent danger, but he is
saved by the opportune arrival of Peter Williams. He passes Sunday, June
12th, with the Welsh preacher and his wife Winifred; on the 21st he
departs with his itinerant hosts to the Welsh border. Before entering
Wales, however, he turns back with Ambrose ("Jasper") Petulengro and
settles with his own stock-in-trade as tinker and blacksmith at the foot
of the dingle hard by Mumper's Lane, near Willenhall, in Staffordshire;
here at the end of June 1825 takes place the classical encounter between
the philologer and the flaming tinman--all this, is it not related in
_Lavengro_, and substantiated with much hard labour of facts and dates by
Dr. W. I. Knapp in his exhaustive biography of George Borrow? The
allurement of his genius is such that the etymologist shall leave his