No sooner had CLARE returned his muscles to the various tasks of a farm labourer than he harked back with a love greater than ever to Thomson’s “Seasons,” reading it as he went to and from his work. The chief part of his leisure he used for the composition of verses, an occupation which served to fix upon him habits of timidity and shyness, especially as he was without a single sympathiser. Because of his strange manners, his fits of abstraction as well as of uttered enthusiasm, his appetite for solitude, the neighbours passed from mere mockery to whispers of a mind diseased, and even of a nature beset by the black ministers of magic. The fact that about this time his mother, for the purposes of fuel, made a clean sweep of his poetic accumulations did its share to loosen his moral control; and when his attempts at gaining encouragement from Mr. Thomas Porter, and patronage from Lord Milton, to whom the parish clerk of Helpstone displayed the rustic poet, failed, he betook himself, this time of his own accord, to the drunken company of the worst livers in the village. Much of CLARE’S future misery proceeded from this lapse. Before bad example had done its utmost to ruin him, Providence, in the somewhat unusual disguise of a recruiting sergeant, came to the rescue. JOHN’S period of military service was brief, for after being instructed at Oundle in the goose-step--that foundation of a glorious career under arms--the corps of which he was a member was disbanded, and he was enabled once more to assume the civilian smock at Helpstone. For all booty he had a second-rate copy of “Paradise Lost” and “The Tempest.” A matter of more importance, however, was the fact that he had departed from the pernicious influence of the roysterers who were leading him to destruction. A number of small adventures were not slow to follow his short intimacy with the clothes and tools of war, what with his trial of a gipsy’s life, and his courting of several girls, one of whom, Elizabeth Newton by name, drove him into a fit of melancholy by playing the part of a jilt. In this state of mind nothing could have suited him better than change of scene, and his departure to Bridge Casterton, there to learn the details of a lime-burner’s trade, happened at a moment fortunate for heart and head alike. It was while he resided in this neighbourhood that he confided to Mr. Henson, a bookseller of Market Deeping, the fact of his colloquy with the Muse, following the avowal by a display of his powers. This confession was the germ of a wide circulation.