“I should think so,” said he, dreamily, “and every kind of water bird.”
Then, suddenly turning round upon me with a start, he said, “But how do you know that I knew Whittlesea Mere?”
“You say in ‘Lavengro’ that you played among the reeds of Whittlesea Mere when you were a child.”
“I don’t mention Whittlesea Mere in ‘Lavengro,’” he said.
“No,” said I, “but you speak of a lake near the old State prison at Norman Cross, and that was Whittlesea Mere.”
“Then you know Whittlesea Mere?” said Borrow, much interested.
“I know the place that was Whittlesea Mere before it was drained,” I said, “and I know the vipers around Norman Cross, and I think I know the lane where you first met Jasper Petulengro. He was a generation before my time. Indeed, I never was thrown much across the Petulengroes in the Eastern Counties, but I knew some of the Hernes and the Lees and the Lovells.”
I then told him what I knew about Romanies and vipers, and also gave him Marcianus’s story about the Moors being invulnerable to the viper’s bite, and about their putting the true breed of a suspected child to the test by setting it to grasp a viper—as he, Borrow, when a child, grasped one of the vipers of Norman Cross.
“The gypsies,” said Borrow, “always believed me to be a Romany. But surely you are not a Romany Rye?”
“No,” I said, “but I am a student of folk-lore; and besides, as it has been my fortune to see every kind of life in England, high and low, I could not entirely neglect the Romanies, could I?”