At this point, the youth in whose story the interest lies being sixteen years old, Cupid, with no loss of his bright qualities after so many centuries of exercise, comes into the recital. To JOHN CLARE, who was moving rapidly towards the full worship of all things lovely, Mary Joyce appeared to be nobody less bewildering and enchanting than a stray from heaven; and though he was prevented from wearing her, the dice of Fortune falling adverse from the box, he never ceased to regard her as his ideal. Of the many pathetic incidents of his life not the least touching is the fact that in his years of a broken brain he cherished as a chief delusion the belief that Mary Joyce was indeed his wife. What the feelings of a nature so intense were when the father of his sweetheart intervened as the proverbial slip between the cup and the lip, we can only conjecture, though the tracing of results is easy enough. After leaving the tankards and the horses of the “Blue Bell,” JOHN CLARE cast about him for some other form of employment. Escaping the pains of stone-cutting and cobbling, he succeeded in becoming a gardener’s apprentice at Burghley Park, the seat of the Marquis of Exeter. Parker Clare began to think that his son was born with an invisible silver spoon in his mouth, while to JOHN eight shillings a week, with lodging free, smacked of the robbers’ cave in the “Arabian Nights.” In reality, this position was altogether undesirable, for the head gardener, not content to degrade himself alone by an excessive swallowing of stimulants, actually devoted his best efforts to make drunkards of his pupils. Unfortunately temptation loomed large at the very moment when CLARE was ripe for mischief. Romance was worsted by swipes (the indignity of the episode may be held to excuse the slang); by means of such thin nepenthe, regret for the loss of Mary Joyce grew less and less; and it not infrequently occurred that the new apprentice slept off his potations by the hedge-side, with no better blanket than a mist, and with the damp turf for sole mattress, thus unconsciously taking in a cargo of ague and fever for future unloading. At last CLARE, in company with another lad who was anxious to show a clean pair of heels to the abstract and concrete brutalities of his master, fled to Grantham, and thence to Newark-upon-Trent, where both the runaways obtained work under a nurseryman. But CLARE was homesick; his mother’s face was as a magnet pulling him to the familiar hovel at Helpstone; no longer could he obey that decree of divorce from his native scenes pronounced against him by the impalpable judge and jury of circumstance. One day, after a terrible journey on foot, he burst into the hut of his parents, weeping for joy to gain for his body the residence which his spirit had occupied so long.