experience of the vicissitudes of a soldier's life, by accompanying
his father, mother, and brother to Colchester to rejoin the regiment.
The whole infancy of George Borrow was spent in the same trailing
restlessness. Napoleon was alive and at large, and the West Norfolks
seemed doomed eternally to march and countermarch in the threatened
area, Sussex, Kent, Essex.

No efforts appear to have been made to steal the younger brother,
although "people were in the habit of standing still to look at me,
ay, more than at my brother." {7b} Unlike John in about everything
that one child could be unlike another, George was a gloomy,
introspective creature who considerably puzzled his parents. He
compares himself to "a deep, dark lagoon, shaded by black pines,
cypresses and yews," {7c} beside which he once paused to contemplate
"a beautiful stream . . . sparkling in the sunshine, and . . .
tumbling merrily into cascades," {7d} which he likened to his
brother.

Slow of comprehension, almost dull-witted, shy of society, sometimes
bursting into tears when spoken to, George became "a lover of nooks
and retired corners," {7e} where he would sit for hours at a time a
prey to "a peculiar heaviness . . . and at times . . . a strange
sensation of fear, which occasionally amounted to horror," {7f} for
which there was no apparent cause. In time he grew to be as much
disliked as his brother was admired. On one occasion an old Jew
pedlar, attracted by the latent intelligence in the smouldering eyes
of the silent child, who ignored his questions and continued tracing
in the dust with his fingers curious lines, pronounced him "a
prophet's child." This carried to the mother's heart a quiet
comfort; and reawakened in her hope for the future of her second son.