The trade difficulty was got over by his becoming an apprentice for the remaining three years of his minority to a Mr. Duddridge, brother to George's former landlord. At the age of twenty he was left alone in London, George having removed to Bury St. Edmund's in his own county, and Nathaniel having married and gone into housekeeping. Robert now took to the study of music, and became an expert player on the violin. At the age of twenty-four he married the daughter of a boat-builder at Woolwich named Church. "I have sold my fiddle and got a wife," he humorously writes to his brother. At first his home was in furnished lodgings, but by dint of hard work and strict economy he managed in a short time to furnish _one_ room on the first floor of a house in Bell Alley, Coleman Street, the old quarters to which he had come fresh from the country on his first becoming a shoemaker. His landlord kindly allowed him the free use of a garret to work in during the day. "In this garret," says his brother, "amid six or seven other workmen, his active mind employed itself in composing the 'Farmer's Boy.'" How long his mind was occupied in this task we cannot tell. One could hardly wonder if the process of composition was slow in the midst of such distracting and unfavorable circumstances. The marvel is that it should have been composed at all under such uncongenial and difficult conditions. So hard pressed for time was the poor poet-shoemaker, and so unable to find the proper materials for writing, that he is said to have made up and kept in his mind no less than 600 lines, that is, about the _half_ of his poem, before he could manage to write it down. And when he did this, he was glad to lay hold of any odd scrap of paper for the purpose; the back of a letter or a printed bill, the margin of newspapers, pieces of pattern-paper, were seized as they came to hand and covered with writing, and then hidden away in cupboards, and occasionally even in some chink in the wall, until they could be collected and arranged for a fair copy, suitable to go into the hands of the printer. It was indeed a wonderful exhibition of mental abstraction and retentive memory. Few, even among poets, could have wrought to any purpose amid the din and conversation of a shoemakers' workroom, and still fewer, even if the excitement of poetic thought had enabled them to compose, could have treasured up their productions in the memory until they amounted to 600 lines. A friend of Bloomfield named Swan, writing to Mr. Capel Lofft, says, "Bloomfield, either from the contracted state of his pecuniary resources to purchase paper, or for other reasons, composed the latter part of 'Autumn' and the whole of 'Winter' in his head, without committing one line to paper! This cannot fail to surprise the literary world, who are well acquainted with the treacherousness of memory, and how soon the most happy ideas, for want of sufficient quickness in writing down, are lost in the rapidity of thought.