Throughout his whole life George Borrow adored his mother, who seems to have developed into a woman of great strength of character far remote from the pretty play-actor who won the heart of a young soldier at East Dereham in the last years of the eighteenth century.  We would gladly know something of the early years of Ann Perfrement.  Her father was a farmer, whose farm at Dumpling Green we have already described.  He did not, however, “farm his own little estate” as Borrow declared.  The grandfather—a French Protestant—came, if we are to believe Borrow, from Caen in Normandy after the Revocation¹ of the Edict of Nantes, but there is no documentary evidence to support the contention².  However, the story of the Huguenot immigration into England is clearly bound up with Norwich and the adjacent district.  And so we may well take the name of “Perfrement” as conclusive³ evidence of a French origin, and reject as utterly⁴ untenable the not unnatural⁵ suggestion of Nathaniel Hawthorne, that Borrow’s mother was “of gypsy descent.”  She was one of the eight children of Samuel and Mary Perfrement, all of whom seem to have devoted⁶ their lives to East Anglia.  We owe to Dr. Knapp’s edition of Lavengro one exquisite⁷ glimpse of Ann’s girlhood that is not in any other issue of the book.  Ann’s elder sister, curious to know if she was ever to be married, falls in with the current superstition⁸ that she must wash her linen⁹ and “watch” it drying before the fire between eleven and twelve at night.  Ann Perfrement was ten years old at the time.  The two girls walked over to East Dereham, purchased the necessary garment, washed it in the pool near the house that may still be seen, and watched and watched.  Suddenly when the clock struck twelve they heard, or thought they heard, a footstep on the path, the wind howled, and the elder sister sprang to the door, locked and bolted it, and then fell in convulsions on the floor.  The superstition, which Borrow p. 15seems to have told his mother had a Danish origin, is common enough in Ireland and in Celtic lands.  It could scarcely have been thus rehearsed by two Norfolk children had they not had the blood of a more imaginative race in their

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