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Hasfeldt wrote, too, saying that he saw his "friend 'tall George, wandering over the mountains until I ached in every joint with the vividness of his descriptions." In all this chorus of praise there was the complaint of the Dublin Review that "Borrow was a missionary sent out by a gang of conspirators against Christianity."
Who could resist the breezy good humour of the following from a letter addressed to Borrow by Hasfeldt years later? "Do you still eat Pike soup? Do you remember the time when you lived on that dish for more than six weeks, and came near exterminating the whole breed? And the pudding that accompanied it, that always lay as hard as a stone on the stomach? This you surely have not forgotten.
So in the prison at Madrid he got on so well with the prisoners that on the third day he spoke their language as if he were "a son of the prison." At Gibraltar he talked to the man of Mogador in Arabic and was taken for "a holy man from the kingdoms of the East," especially when he produced the shekel which had been given him by Hasfeldt: a Jew there believed him to be a Salamancan Jew.
He admired the work of his Creator, but he would not affect to be satisfied with it in every detail, and stepping forward he snatched the brush and made a bolder line and braver colour. Also he ardently desired to do more than he ever did. When in Spain he wrote to his friend Hasfeldt at St. Petersburg, telling him that he wished to visit China by way of Russia or Constantinople and Armenia.
There was something of the same atmosphere in his letters as in those of John Hasfeldt: a frank, affectionate interest in Borrow and what affected him that it was impossible to resent. "How I wish you had given us more about yourself," he wrote to Borrow apropos of The Zincali, "instead of the extracts from those blunder-headed old Spaniards, who knew nothing about Gypsies!
On 21st January 1843 he writes to John Murray, Junr.: "I meditate shortly a return to Barbary in quest of the Witch Hamlet, and my adventures in the land of wonders will serve capitally to fill the thin volume of My Life, a Drama, By G. B." Again and again Borrow refers to My Life. Hasfeldt and Ford also wrote of it as the "wonderful life" and "the Biography."
In this literary treasure-house Borrow found facilities for study such as he nowhere else could hope to obtain. Another friendship that Borrow made was with John P. Hasfeldt, a man of about his own age attached to the Danish Legation, who also gave lessons in languages. Borrow seems to have been greatly attracted to Hasfeldt, who wrote to him with such cordiality.
Still later Constantinople was considered and then the coast of Barbary. Into his letters there crept a note of querulous complaint. John Hasfeldt besought him to remember how much he had travelled and he would find that he had wandered enough, and then he would accustom himself to rest.
As early as July 1841 he had thought of settling in Berlin and devoting himself to study. Hasfeldt suggested Denmark, the land of the Sagas. Later in the same year Africa had presented itself to Borrow as a possible retreat, but Ford advised him against it as "the land from which few travellers return," and told him that he had much better go to Seville.
It was Hasfeldt who gave to Borrow as a parting gift the silver shekel that he invariably carried about with him, and which caused him to be hailed as blessed by the Gibraltar Jews. In his letter Hasfeldt shows himself a delightful correspondent. His generous camaraderie seemed to warm Borrow to response, as indeed well it might.
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