Strange things happen to him wherever he goes; odd figures step from out the hedgerow and engage him in wild converse; beggar-women read _Moll Flanders_ on London Bridge; Armenian merchants cuff deaf and dumb clerks in London counting- houses; prize-fighters, dog-fanciers, Methodist preachers, Romany ryes and their rawnees move on and off.

Why should not strange things happen to Lavengro?
Why should not strange folk suddenly make their appearance before him and as suddenly take their departure?
Is he not strange himself?
Did he not puzzle Mr.Petulengro, excite the admiration of Mrs.
Petulengro, the murderous hate of Mrs.Herne, and drive Isopel Berners half distracted?
Nobody has, so far, attempted to write the life of George Borrow.

Nor can we wonder.

How could any one dare to follow in the phosphorescent track of _Lavengro_ and _The Romany Rye_, or add a line or a hue to the portraits there contained of Borrow's father and mother--the gallant soldier who had no chance, and whose most famous engagement took place, not in Flanders, or in Egypt, or on the banks of the Indus or Oxus, but in Hyde Park, his foe being Big Ben Brain; and the dame of the oval face, olive complexion, and Grecian forehead, sitting in the dusky parlour in the solitary house at the end of the retired court shaded by lofty poplars?
I pity 'the individual' whose task it should be to travel along the enchanted wake either of Lavengro in England or Don Jorge in Spain.
Poor would be his part; no better than that of Arthur in 'The Bothie':-- And it was told, the Piper narrating and Arthur correcting, Colouring he, dilating, magniloquent, glorying in picture, He to a matter-of-fact still softening, paring, abating, He to the great might-have-been upsoaring, sublime and ideal, He to the merest it-was restricting, diminishing, dwarfing, River to streamlet reducing, and fall to slope subduing: So it was told, the Piper narrating, corrected of Arthur.
George Borrow, like many another great man, was born in Norfolk, at East Dereham, in 1803, and at an early age began those rambles he has made famous, being carried about by his father, Captain Borrow, who was chiefly employed as a recruiting officer.

The reader of _Lavengro_ may safely be left to make out his own itinerary.