there." They are not a device. The re-appearances of these wandering
men are for the most part only pleasantly unexpected. Their mystery is
the mystery of nature and life. They keep their language and their tents
against the mass of civilization and length of time. They are foreigners
but as native as the birds. It is Borrow's triumph to make them as
romantic as their reputation while yet satisfying Gypsy students as to
his facts.

Jasper is almost like a second self, a kind of more simple, atavistic
self, to Borrow, as in that characteristic picture, where he is drawing
near to Wales with his friends, the Welsh preacher and his wife. A brook
is the border and they point it out. There is a horseman entering it:
"he stops in the middle of it as if to water his steed." They ask
Lavengro if he will come with them into Wales. They persuade him:

"'I will not go with you,' said I. 'Dost thou see that man in the ford?'

"'Who is staring at us so, and whose horse has not yet done drinking? Of
course I see him.'

"'I shall turn back with him. God bless you!'

"'Go back with him not,' said Peter, 'he is one of those whom I like not,
one of the clibberty-clabber, as Master Ellis Wyn observes--turn not with
that man.'

"'Go not back with him,' said Winifred. 'If thou goest with that man,
thou wilt soon forget all our profitable counsels; come with us.'

"'I cannot; I have much to say to him. Kosko Divous, Mr. Petulengro.'