boys of his age had always been accustomed. Occupation of some sort
he must have, if only to keep at a distance that insistent melancholy
that seems to have been for ever hovering about him, and the tempter
whispered "Languages." {21a} One day chance led him to a bookstall
whereon lay a polyglot dictionary, "which pretended to be an easy
guide to the acquirement of French, Italian, Low Dutch, and English."
He took the two first, and when he had gleaned from the old volume
all it had to teach him, he longed for a master. Him he found in the
person of an old French emigre priest, {21b} a study in snuff-colour
and drab with a frill of dubious whiteness, who attended to the
accents of a number of boarding-school young ladies. The progress of
his pupil so much pleased the old priest that "after six months'
tuition, the master would sometimes, on his occasional absences to
teach in the country, request his so forward pupil to attend for him
his home scholars." {21c} It was M. D'Eterville who uttered the
second recorded prophecy concerning George Borrow: "Vous serez un
jour un grand philologue, mon cher," he remarked, and heard that his
pupil nourished aspirations towards other things than mere philology.

In the study of French, Spanish, and Italian, Borrow spent many hours
that other boys would have devoted to pleasure; yet he was by no
means a student only. He found time to fish and to shoot, using a
condemned, honey-combed musket that bore the date of 1746. His
fishing was done in the river Yare, which flowed through the estate
of John Joseph Gurney, the Quaker-banker of Earlham Hall, two miles
out of Norwich. It was here that he was reproached by the voice,
"clear and sonorous as a bell," of the banker himself; not for
trespassing, but "for pulling all those fish out of the water, and
leaving them to gasp in the sun."