Old Familiar Faces

Old Familiar Faces by Theodore Watts-Dunton is about Watts-Dunton's recollections of his author and poet friends. Excerpt: "I have been reading those charming reminiscences of George Borrow which appeared in The Athenæum. I have been reading them, I may add, under the happiest conditions for enjoying them—amid the self-same heather and bracken where I have so often listened to Lavengro's quaint talk of all the wondrous things he saw and heard in his wondrous life. So graphically has Mr. Hake depicted him, that as I walked and read his paper I seemed to hear the fine East-Anglian accent of the well-remembered voice—I seemed to see the mighty figure, strengthened by the years rather than stricken by them, striding along between the whin bushes or through the quags, now stooping over the water to pluck the wild mint he loved, whose lilac-colored blossoms perfumed the air as he crushed them…"