On June 1st he makes the first practical experience of a vagrant's life, and passes the night in the open air in a Shropshire dell; on June 5th he is visited by Leonora Herne, the grandchild of the old "brimstone hag" who was jealous of the cordiality with which the young stranger had been received by the Petulengroes and initiated in the secrets of their gipsy tribe.

Three days later, betrayed to the old woman by Leonora, he is drabbed (_i.e_.

poisoned) with the manricli or doctored cake of Mrs.Herne; his life is in imminent danger, but he is saved by the opportune arrival of Peter Williams.

He passes Sunday, June 12th, with the Welsh preacher and his wife Winifred; on the 21st he departs with his itinerant hosts to the Welsh border.

Before entering Wales, however, he turns back with Ambrose ("Jasper") Petulengro and settles with his own stock-in-trade as tinker and blacksmith at the foot of the dingle hard by Mumper's Lane, near Willenhall, in Staffordshire; here at the end of June 1825 takes place the classical encounter between the philologer and the flaming tinman--all this, is it not related in _Lavengro_, and substantiated with much hard labour of facts and dates by Dr.W.I.Knapp in his exhaustive biography of George Borrow?
The allurement of his genius is such that the etymologist shall leave his roots and the philologer his Maeso-Gothic to take to the highway and dwell in the dingle with "Don Jorge." Lavengro's triumph over the flaming tinman is the prelude to what Professor Saintsbury justly calls "the miraculous episode of Ysopel Berners," and the narrative of the author's life is thence continued, with many digressions, but with a remarkable fidelity to fact as far as the main issue is concerned, until the narrative, though not the life- story of the author, abruptly terminates at Horncastle, in August 1825.
There follows what is spoken of as the veiled period of Borrow's life, from 1826 to 1833.
The years in which we drift are generally veiled from posterity.