Sordid and commonplace enough are the details; simple and free from every kind of inflation the language in which they are narrated.

Yet how picturesque are these vignettes of London life! How vivid and yet how strange are the figures that animate them! The harsh literary impresario with his "drug in the market," who seems to have stalked straight out of Smollett, {8} the gnarled old applewoman, with every wrinkle shown, on her stall upon London Bridge, the grasping Armenian merchant who softened at the sound of his native tongue, the giddy young spendthrift Francis Ardry and the confiding young creature who had permitted him to hire her a very handsome floor in the West End, the gipsies and thimble-riggers in Greenwich Park--what moving and lifelike figures are these, stippled in with a seeming absence of art, yet as strange and as rare as a Night in Bagdad, a chapter of Balzac, or the most fantastic scene in the _New Arabian Nights_.
This brief recapitulation--in which it has been possible but just to touch upon a few of the inner springs of Borrow's life as revealed in the autobiographical _Lavengro_--brings us once again to that spring day in 1825--May 20th--when the author disposed of an unidentifiable manuscript for the sumptuous equivalent of 20 pounds.

On May 22nd, after little more than a year's residence in London, he abandons the city.

From London he proceeds to Amesbury, in Wiltshire, which he reaches on May 23rd; visits Stonehenge, the Roman Camp of Old Sarum and Salisbury; on May 26th he leaves Salisbury, and (after an encounter with the long-lost son of the old applewoman, returned from Botany Bay), strikes north-west.
On the 30th he has been walking four days in a northerly direction, when he arrives at the inn where the maid Jenny refreshes him at the pump, and he meets the author with whom he passes the night.

On the 31st he purchases the horse and cart of Jack Slingsby, whom he had previously seen but once, at Tamworth, many years ago when he was little more than a child.