Page:The English Peasant.djvu/309

 Alas, he knew too much of every pain, That shower'd full thick on his unshelter'd head."

Ignorant of all other lore, his parents had an endless stock of ghost stories and fairy tales to tell him, while an old woman who tended the cows belonging to the village on Helpstone Heath was his first teacher in the art of poesy. Day by day, as he went to school, he used to wander after his old friend, listening with delight to her songs and ditties, so that the child was for ever humming, even in his dreams, such old-world rhymes as these,—

Thus in various ways did his appetite for the beautiful, the human, the wonderful, and the musical get food.

But bread and raiment were still more imperiously needful since his father was so often ailing. So Parker Clare made his son a small flail wherewith he could assist him to thresh. But the child's weak arms could do so little that they put him with the ploughman. This, too, was far beyond his strength; in a few months he fell ill, and was laid up with a tertiary ague. Poverty, however, has no choice, and it was better to drag himself from his bed to work in the damp fields than to have nothing to eat but potatoes and rye-bread.

And still more his soul refused to die of starvation, and demanded its portion of food also; so he laid by his pence, and when the slack time came in winter, he went to school at Glinton, a village noted for its tapering spire, and for its comfortable look compared to poverty-stricken Helpstone. His schoolmaster was a tall old man, with white hair hanging down over his coat collar. He was fond of the violin and long walks, pursuing the latter with the spirit of a true pedestrian, taking great strides, wrapt in thought, and humming a tune to himself as he went along. His boys laughed at his ways, but loved him, for he was very good to them. He allowed them to read books out of his little library, which to a lad like Clare was a privilege indeed. Hungry he often was for a crust of bread, but infinitely more did he hunger after a book. He made such good use of the precious hours he spent at Mr Merrishaw's school