Page:The English Peasant.djvu/314

 "What a life for John!" thought Parker Clare, as he rejoiced with his wife over their great success. How could he help looking forward to the day when they should all go and live in one of the Marquis's best cottages, or, perhaps, indeed, keep one of the lodges at the park gates! John, too, no doubt, had his thoughts; the inspiration first came in Burghley Park, and there he was to work and live. How he would sing and make melody in his heart the live-long day!

But alas! the apprenticeship at Burghley Park proved an apple of Sodom. The gardener and his men were sons of Belial. Every night it was the custom to lock up the workmen lest they should rob the orchards. However, directly the master went out, as he usually did to get tipsy at an inn in the town, the men and boys managed to get through one of the windows, scramble over the park palings, and betake themselves to a neighbouring public-house, called "The Hole in the Wall," kept by a retired servant from the great house.

Of course John Clare was coaxed and persuaded to go, and of course he became as bad as any of them. Doubtless he had often wondered whether the crooning old woman whom the villagers pointed out as a witch, had really

"Sold herself to Satan's evil powers."

Did he ever think that he himself was really doing so now? Poor fellow, he lay again and again all night besotted under a tree. What wonder that a horrible rheumatism tormented him, and that the inspiration left him? Never afterwards did he free himself from the habit incurred at Burghley Park.

At last he broke his contract and ran off, perhaps the only way he could conceive of deliverance. At first he and his companion set out northwards, but ere long his heart forced him home again, whither he returned a poor destitute lad, all his bright visions of Burghley Park lost for ever in a mist of sin and brutality.

Once again back and in the fields, the inspiration returned, and he began to write poetic effusions, and to read them whenever he could get a listener. But his people had a dull ear for such stuff; his comrades gibed at him, his father reproved him, and his mother, anxious soul—more suspicious, doubtless, of those bits of