intensity was lent by the fair skin to the dark lustre of the eyes.  What struck the observer, therefore, was not the beauty but the strangeness of the man’s appearance.  It was not this feature or that which struck the eye, it was the expression of the face as a whole.  If it were possible to describe this expression in a word or two, it might, perhaps, be called a shy self-consciousness.

How did it come about, then, that a man shy, self-conscious, and sensitive to the last degree, became the Ulysses of the writing fraternity, wandering among strangers all over Europe, and consorting on intimate terms with that race who, more than all others, are repelled by shy self-consciousness—the gipsies?  This, perhaps, is how the puzzle may be explained.  When Borrow was talking to people in his own class of life there was always in his bearing a kind

of shy, defiant egotism.  What Carlyle calls the “armed neutrality” of social intercourse oppressed him.  He felt himself to be in the enemy’s camp.  In his eyes there was always a kind of watchfulness, as if he were taking stock of his interlocutor and weighing him against himself.  He seemed to be observing what effect his words were having, and this attitude repelled people at first.  But the moment he approached a gipsy on the heath, or a poor Jew in Houndsditch, or a homeless wanderer by the wayside, he became another man.  He threw off the burden of restraint.  The feeling of the “armed neutrality” was left behind, and he seemed to be at last enjoying the only social intercourse that could give him pleasure.  This it was that enabled him to make friends so entirely with the gipsies.  Notwithstanding what is called “Romany guile” (which is the growth of ages of oppression), the basis of the Romany character is a joyous frankness.  Once let the isolating wall which shuts off the Romany from the “Gorgio” be broken through, and the communicativeness of the Romany temperament begins to show itself.  The gipsies are extremely close observers; they were very quick to notice how different was Borrow’s bearing towards themselves from his bearing towards people of his own race, and Borrow used to say that “old Mrs. Herne and Leonora were

the only gipsies who suspected and disliked him.”