George Borrow | Page 5

unknown man, his
prowess and strength were notorious, and no one cared to encounter
him. Some of the Jews looked eager for a moment; but their sharp eyes
quailed quickly before his savage glances, as he towered in the ring, his
huge form dilating, and his black features convulsed with excitement.
The Westminster bravos eyed the Gypsy askance; but the comparison,
if they made any, seemed by no means favourable to themselves.
'Gypsy! rum chap.--Ugly customer,--always in training.' Such were the
exclamations which I heard, some of which at that period of my life I
did not understand.
"No man would fight the Gypsy.--Yes! a strong country fellow wished
to win the stakes, and was about to fling up his hat in defiance, but he
was prevented by his friends, with--'Fool! he'll kill you!'
"As the Gypsies were mounting their horses, I heard the dusty phantom
exclaim--
"'Brother, you are an arrant ring-maker and a horse-breaker; you'll

make a hempen ring to break your own neck of a horse one of these
days.'
"They pressed their horses' flanks, again leaped over the ditches, and
speedily vanished, amidst the whirlwinds of dust which they raised
upon the road.
"The words of the phantom Gypsy were ominous. Gypsy Will was
eventually executed for a murder committed in his early youth, in
company with two English labourers, one of whom confessed the fact
on his death-bed. He was the head of the clan Young, which, with the
clan Smith, still haunts two of the eastern counties."
In spite of this, Borrow said in the same book that this would probably
be the last occasion he would have to speak of the Gypsies or anything
relating to them. In "The Bible in Spain," written and revised several
years later, he changed his mind. He wrote plenty about Gypsies and
still more about himself. When he wished to show the height of the
Spanish Prime Minister, Mendizabal, he called him "a huge athletic
man, somewhat taller than myself, who measure six feet two without
my shoes." He informed the public that when he met an immense dog
in strolling round the ruins above Monte Moro, he stooped till his chin
nearly touched his knee and looked the animal full in the face, "and, as
John Leyden says, in the noblest ballad which the Land of Heather has
produced:--
'The hound he yowled, and back he fled, As struck with fairy charm.'"
When his servant Lopez was imprisoned at Villallos, Borrow had
reason to fear that the man would be sacrificed to political opponents in
that violent time, so, as he told the English minister at Madrid, he bore
off Lopez, single-handed and entirely unarmed, through a crowd of at
least one hundred peasants, and furthermore shouted: "Hurrah for
Isabella the Second." And as for mystery, "The Bible in Spain"
abounds with invitations to admiration and curiosity. Let one example
suffice. He had come back to Seville from a walk in the country when a
man emerging from an archway looked in his face and started back,
"exclaiming in the purest and most melodious French: 'What do I see?

If my eyes do not deceive me--it is himself. Yes, the very same as I saw
him first at Bayonne; then long subsequently beneath the brick wall at
Novgorod; then beside the Bosphorus; and last at--at--O my respectable
and cherished friend, where was it that I had last the felicity of seeing
your well- remembered and most remarkable physiognomy?'"
Borrows answers: "It was in the south of Ireland, if I mistake not. Was
it not there that I introduced you to the sorcerer who tamed the savage
horses by a single whisper into their ear? But tell me, what brings you
to Spain and Andalusia, the last place where I should have expected to
find you."
Baron Taylor (Isidore Justin Severin, Baron Taylor, 1789-1879) now
introduces him to a friend as "My most cherished and respectable
friend, one who is better acquainted with Gypsy ways than the Chef de
Bohemiens a Triana, one who is an expert whisperer and horse-sorcerer,
and who, to his honour I say it, can wield hammer and tongs, and
handle a horse-shoe, with the best of the smiths amongst the Alpujarras
of Granada."
Borrow then lightly portrays his accomplished and extraordinary
cosmopolitan friend, with the conclusion:
"He has visited most portions of the earth, and it is remarkable enough
that we are continually encountering each other in strange places and
under singular circumstances. Whenever he descries me, whether in the
street or the desert, the brilliant hall or amongst Bedouin haimas, at
Novgorod or Stamboul, he flings up his arms and exclaims, 'O ciel! I
have again the felicity of seeing my cherished and most respectable
B---.'"
Borrow could not avoid making himself impressive