ill-rewarded old disciplinarian (who combined a tenderness of heart with
a fondness for military metaphor that frequently reminds one of "My Uncle
Toby"), the details of the ailments and the portents that attended his
infantile career, and, above all, the glimpses of the wandering military
life from barrack to barrack and from garrison to garrison, inevitably
remind the reader of the childish reminiscences of Laurence Sterne, a
writer to whom it may thus early be said that George Borrow paid no small
amount of unconscious homage. A homage of another sort, fully recognised
and declared, was that paid to the great work of Defoe, and to the spirit
of strange and romantic enterprise which it aroused in its reader.

After _Robinson Crusoe_ there played across the disk of his youthful
memory a number of weird and hairy figures never to be effaced. A
strange old herbalist and snake-killer with a skin cap first whetted his
appetite for the captivating confidences of roadside vagrants, and the
acquaintanceship serves as an introduction to the scene of the gipsy
encampment, where the young Sapengro or serpent charmer was first claimed
as brother by Jasper Petulengro. The picture of the encampment may serve
as an example of Borrovian prose, nervous, unembarrassed, and graphic.

One day it happened, being on my rambles, I entered a green lane which
I had never seen before. At first it was rather narrow, but as I
advanced it became considerably wider. In the middle was a drift-way
with deep ruts, but right and left was a space carpeted with a sward
of trefoil and clover. There was no lack of trees, chiefly ancient
oaks, which, flinging out their arms from either side, nearly formed a
canopy and afforded a pleasing shelter from the rays of the sun, which
was burning fiercely above. Suddenly a group of objects attracted my
attention. Beneath one of the largest of the trees, upon the grass,
was a kind of low tent or booth, from the top of which a thin smoke