Lavengro | Page 6

the ravishing strains she could draw from it. This obsolete instrument is six-stringed, with two of the strings reaching beyond the key-board, and a bridge placed, not at right angles to the sides of the instrument, but in an oblique direction. Though in some respects inferior to the violin, it is in other respects superior to it. Sinfi's performances on this remarkable instrument showed her to be a musical genius of a high order.

VII. MY FIRST MEETING WITH BORROW.
But I am not leaving myself much room for personal reminiscences of Borrow after all--though these are what I sat down to write.
Dr. Hake, in his memoirs of "Eighty Years," records thus the first meeting between Borrow and myself at Roehampton, at the doctor's own delightful house, whose windows at the back looked over Richmond Park, and in front over the wildest part of Wimbledon Common.
"Later on, George Borrow turned up while Watts was there, and we went through a pleasant trio, in which Borrow, as was his wont, took the first fiddle. The reader must not here take metaphor for music. Borrow made himself very agreeable to Watts, recited a fairy tale in the best style to him, and liked him."
There is, however, no doubt that Borrow would have run away from me had I been associated in his mind with the literary calling. But at that time I had written nothing at all save poems, and a prose story or two of a romantic kind, and even these, though some of the poems have since appeared, were then known only through private circulation.
About me there was nothing of the literary flavour: no need to flee away from me as he fled from the writing fraternity. He had not long before this refused to allow Dr. Hake to introduce the late W. R. S. Ralston to him, simply because the Russian scholar moved in the literary world.
With regard to newspaper critiques of books his axiom was that "whatever is praised by the press is of necessity bad," and he refused to read anything that was so praised.
After the "fairy tale" mentioned by Dr. Hake was over, we went, at Borrow's suggestion, for a ramble through Richmond Park, calling on the way at the "Bald-Faced Stag" in Kingston Vale, in order that Borrow should introduce me to Jerry Abershaw's sword, which was one of the special glories of that once famous hostelry. A divine summer day it was I remember--a day whose heat would have been oppressive had it not been tempered every now and then by a playful silvery shower falling from an occasional wandering cloud, whose slate-coloured body thinned at the edges to a fringe of lace brighter than any silver.
These showers, however, seemed, as Borrow remarked, merely to give a rich colour to the sunshine, and to make the wild flowers in the meadows on the left breathe more freely. In a word, it was one of those uncertain summer days whose peculiarly English charm was Borrow's special delight. He liked rain, but he liked it falling on the green umbrella (enormous, shaggy, like a gypsy-tent after a summer storm) he generally carried. As we entered the Robin Hood Gate we were confronted by a sudden weird yellow radiance, magical and mysterious, which showed clearly enough that in the sky behind us there was gleaming over the fields and over Wimbledon Common a rainbow of exceptional brilliance, while the raindrops sparkling on the ferns seemed answering every hue in the magic arch far away. Borrow told us some interesting stories of Romany superstitions in connection with the rainbow--how, by making a "trus'hul" (cross) of two sticks, the Romany chi who "pens the dukkerin can wipe the rainbow out of the sky," etc. Whereupon Hake, quite as original a man as Borrow, and a humourist of a still rarer temper, launched out into a strain of wit and whim, which it is not my business here to record, upon the subject of the "Spirit of the Rainbow" which a certain child went out to find.
Borrow loved Richmond Park, and he seemed to know every tree. I found also that he was extremely learned in deer, and seemed familiar with every dappled coat which, washed and burnished by the showers, seemed to shine in the sun like metal. Of course, I observed him closely, and I began to wonder whether I had encountered, in the silvery-haired giant striding by my side, with a vast umbrella under his arm, a true "Child of the Open Air."
"Did a true Child of the Open Air ever carry a gigantic green umbrella that would have satisfied Sarah Gamp herself?" I murmured to Hake, while Borrow lingered under a tree and, looking round the Park, said, in a dreamy way, "Old England! Old England!"

VIII. A CHILD