excessive love of her pipe can very appropriately be introduced here, and I am glad that Mr. Hake has recalled it to my mind.  It shows not only Borrow’s relations to childhood, but also his susceptibility to those charms of womankind to which Dr. Jessopp thinks he was impervious.  Borrow was fond of telling this story himself, in support of his anti-tobacco bias.  Whenever he was told, as he sometimes was, that what brought on the “horrors” when he lived alone in the dingle, was the want of tobacco, this story was certain to come up.

One lovely morning in the late summer, just before the trees were clothed with what is called “gypsy gold,” and the bright green of the foliage showed scarcely a touch of bronze—at that very moment, indeed, when the spirits of all the wild flowers that have left the common and the hedgerow seem to come back for an hour and mingle their half-forgotten perfumes with the new breath of calamint, ground-ivy, and pimpernel, he and a friend were walking towards a certain camp of gryengroes well known to them both.  They were bound upon a quaint expedition.  Will the reader “be surprised to learn” that it was connected with Matthew Arnold and a race in which he took a good deal of interest, the gypsies?

Borrow, whose attention had been only lately directed by his friend to “The Scholar Gypsy,” had declared that there was scarcely any latter-day poetry worth reading, and also that whatever the merits of Matthew Arnold’s poem might be from any supposed artistic point of view, it showed that Arnold had no conception of the Romany temper, and that no gypsy who ever lived could sympathise with it, or even understand its motive in the least degree.  Borrow’s

friend had challenged this, contending that howsoever Arnold’s classic language might soar above a gypsy’s intelligence, the motive was so clearly developed that the most illiterate person could grasp it.  This was why in company with Borrow he was now going (with a copy of Arnold’s poems in his pocket) to try “The Scholar Gypsy” upon the first intelligent gypsy woman they should meet at the camp: as to gypsy men, “they were,” said Borrow, “too prosaic to furnish a fair test.”

As they were walking along, Borrow’s eyes, which were as long-sighted as a gypsy’s, perceived a white speck in a twisted old hawthorn bush some distance off.  He stopped and said: “At first I thought that white speck in the bush was a piece of paper, but it’s a magpie,” next to the water-wagtail the gypsies’ most famous bird.  On going up to the bush they discovered a magpie crouched among the leaves.  As it did not stir at their approach, Borrow’s friend said to him: “It is wounded—or else dying—or is it a tame bird escaped from a cage?”

“Hawk!” said Borrow, laconically, and turned up his face and gazed into the sky.  “The magpie is waiting till the hawk has caught his quarry and made his meal.  I fancy he has himself been ‘chivvied’ by the hawk, as the gypsies would say.”

And there, sure enough, beneath one of the silver clouds that specked the dazzling blue a hawk—one of the kind which takes its prey in the open rather than in the thick woodlands—was wheeling up and up, and trying its best to get above a poor little lark in order to stoop at and devour it.  That the magpie had seen the hawk and had been a witness of the opening of the tragedy of the lark was evident, for in its dread of the common foe of all well-intentioned and honest birds, it had forgotten its fear of all creatures except the hawk.  Man it looked upon as a protecting friend.

As Borrow and his friend were gazing at the bird a woman’s voice at their elbows said—

“It’s lucky to chivvy the hawk what chivvies a magpie.  I shall stop here till the hawk’s flew away.”

They turned round, and there stood a magnificent gypsy woman, carrying, gypsy fashion, a weakly child that, in spite

of its sallow and wasted cheek, proclaimed itself to be hers.  By her side stood a young gypsy girl of about seventeen years of age.  She was beautiful—quite remarkably so—but her beauty was not of the typical Romany kind.  It was, perhaps, more like the beauty of a Capri girl.

She was bareheaded—there was not even a gypsy handkerchief on her head—her hair was not plaited, and was not smooth and glossy like a gypsy girl’s hair, but flowed thick and heavy and rippling down the back of her neck and upon her shoulders.  In the tumbled tresses glittered certain objects, which at first sight seemed to be jewels.  They were small dead dragon-flies of the crimson kind called “sylphs.”

To Borrow and his friend these gypsies were well known.  The woman with the child was one of the Boswells: I dare not say what was her connection, if any, with “Boswell the Great”—I mean Sylvester Boswell, the grammarian and “well-known and popalated gipsy of Codling Gap,” who, on a memorable occasion, wrote so eloquently about the superiority of the gypsy mode of life to all others “on the accont of health, sweetness of air, and for enjoying the pleasure of Nature’s life.”  But this I do remember—that it was the very same Perpinia Boswell whose remarkable Christian name has lately been made the subject of inquiry in The Guardian.  The other gypsy, the girl of the dragon-flies, I prefer to leave nameless here.

After greeting the two, Borrow looked at the weakling child with the deepest interest, and said, “This chavo ought not to look like that—with such a mother as you, Perpinia.”

“And with such a daddy, too,” said she.  “Mike’s stronger for a man nor even I am for a woman”—a glow of wifely pride passing over her face; “and as to good looks, it’s him as is got the good looks, not me.  But none on us can’t make it out about the chavo.  He’s so weak and sick he don’t look as if he belonged to Boswells’ breed at all.”

“How many pipes of tobacco do you smoke in a day?” said Borrow’s friend, looking at the great black cutty pipe protruding from Perpinia’s finely cut lips, and seeming strangely out of place there.

“Can’t say,” said she, laughing.

“About as many as she can afford to buy,” interrupted her companion—“that’s all.  Mike don’t like her a-smokin’.  He

says it makes her look like a old Londra Irish woman in Common Garding Market.”

“You must not smoke another pipe,” said Borrow’s friend to the mother—“not another pipe till the child leaves the breast.”

“What?” said Perpinia defiantly.  “As if I could live without my pipe!”

“Fancy Pep a-livin’ without her baccy,” laughed the girl of the dragon-flies.

“Your child can’t live with it,” said Borrow’s friend to Perpinia.  “That pipe of yours is full of a poison called nicotine.”

“Nick what?” said the girl, laughing.  “That’s a new kind o’ Nick.  Why, you smoke yourself!”

“Nicotine,” said Borrow’s friend; “and the first part of Pep’s body that the poison gets into is her breast, and—”

“Gets into my burk?” said Perpinia; “get along wi’ ye.”

“Yes.”

“Do it pison Pep’s milk?” said the girl.

“Yes.”

“That ain’t true,” said Perpinia; “can’t be true.”

“It is true,” said Borrow’s friend.  “If you don’t give up that pipe for a time the child will die, or else be a rickety thing all his life.  If you do give it up, it will grow up to be as fine a Romany chal as Mike himself.”

“Chavo agin pipe, Pep,” said the girl.

“Lend me your pipe, Perpinia,” said Borrow, in that hail-fellow-well-met tone of