“In some parts of the world and more particularly in India there are people who devote themselves to the pursuit and taming of serpents. Had I been born in those regions I perhaps should have been what is termed a snake charmer. That I had a genius for the profession, as probably all have who follow it, I gave decided proof of the above instance as in others which I shall have occasion subsequently to relate.”
This he cut out presumably because it was too “informing” and too little “wild and strange.”
A little later in the same chapter he describes how, before he was four years old, near Hythe, in Kent, he saw in a penthouse against an old village church, “skulls of the old Danes”:
“‘Long ago’ (said the sexton, with Borrow’s aid), ‘long ago they came pirating into these parts: and then there chanced a mighty shipwreck, for God was angry with them, and He sunk them; and their skulls, as they came ashore, were placed here as a memorial. There were many more when I was young, but now they are fast disappearing. Some of them must have belonged to strange fellows, madam. Only see that one; why, the two young gentry can scarcely lift it!’ And, indeed, my brother and myself had entered the Golgotha, and commenced handling these grim relics of mortality. One enormous skull, lying in a corner, had fixed our attention, and we had drawn it forth. Spirit of eld, what a skull was yon!
“I still seem to see it, the huge grim thing; many of the others were large, strikingly so, and appeared fully to justify the old man’s conclusion that their owners must have been strange fellows; but compared with this mighty mass of bone they looked small and diminutive, like those of pigmies; it must have belonged to a giant, one of those
red-haired warriors of whose strength and stature such wondrous tales are told in the ancient chronicles of the north, and whose grave-hills, when ransacked, occasionally reveal secrets which fill the minds of puny moderns with astonishment and awe. Reader, have you ever pored days and nights over the pages of Snorro? probably not, for he wrote in a language which few of the present day understand, and few would be tempted to read him tamed down by Latin dragomans. A brave old book is that of Snorro, containing the histories and adventures of old northern kings and champions, who seemed to have been quite different men, if we may judge from the feats which they performed, from those of these days. One of the best of his histories is that which describes the life of Harald Haardraade, who, after manifold adventures by land and sea, now a pirate, now a mercenary of the Greek emperor, became King of Norway, and eventually perished at the battle of Stanford Bridge, whilst engaged in a gallant onslaught upon England. Now, I have often thought that the old Kemp, whose mouldering skull in the Golgotha at Hythe my brother and myself could scarcely lift, must have resembled in one respect at least this Harald, whom Snorro describes as a great and wise ruler and a determined leader, dangerous in battle, of fair presence, and measuring in height just five ells, neither more nor less.”
Of this incident he says he need offer no apology for relating it “as it subsequently exercised considerable influence over his pursuits,” i.e., his study of Danish literature; but in the proof he added also that the incident, “perhaps more than anything else, tended to bring my imaginative powers into action”—this he cut out, though the skulls may have impressed him as the skeleton disinterred by a horse impressed Richard Jefferies and haunted him in his “Gamekeeper,” “Meadow Thoughts,” and elsewhere.
Sometimes he modified a showy phrase, and “when I became ambitious of the title of Lavengro and strove to deserve it” was cut down to “when I became a student.” When he wrote of Cowper in the third chapter he said, to justify Cowper’s melancholy, that “Providence, whose ways are not our ways, interposed, and with the withering blasts of misery nipped that which otherwise might have terminated in fruit, noxious and lamentable”; but he substituted a mere “perhaps” for the words about Providence. In the description of young Jasper he changed his “short arms like” his father, into “long arms unlike.”
In the fourteenth chapter Borrow describes his father’s retirement from the army after Waterloo, and his settling down at Norwich, so poor as to be anxious for his children’s future. He speaks of poor officers who “had slight influence with the great who gave themselves very little trouble either about them or their families.” Originally he went on thus, but cut out the words from the proof:
“Yet I have reason for concluding that they were not altogether overlooked by a certain power still higher than even the aristocracy of England and with yet more extensive influence in the affairs of the world. I allude to Providence, which, it is said, never forsakes those who trust in it, as I suppose these old soldiers did, for I have known many instances in which their children have contrived to make their way gallantly in the world, unaided by the patronage of the great, whilst others who were possessed of it were most miserably shipwrecked, being suddenly overset by some unexpected squall, against which it could avail them nothing.”