Clare was to suffer the slow torture of remorse, until at length deliberately yielding himself up to his amazing imagination he held conversation with Mary, John Clare's Mary, his first wife Mary--as though she had not lived unwed, and had not been in her grave for years. But this was not yet; and we must return to the boy Clare, now terminating his year's hiring at the Blue Bell. It was time for him to take up some trade in good earnest; accordingly, in an evil hour disguised as a fortunate one, he was apprenticed to the head gardener at Burghley Park. The head gardener was in practice a sot and a slave-driver. After much drunken wild bravado, not remarkable in the lad Clare considering his companions and traditions, there came the impulse to escape; with the result that Clare and a companion were shortly afterwards working in a nursery garden at Newark-upon-Trent. Both the nursery garden and "the silver Trent" are met again in the poems composed in his asylum days; but for the time being they meant little to him, and he suddenly departed through the snow. Arrived home at Helpston, he lost some time in finding farm work and in writing verses: sharing a loft at night with a fellow-labourer, he would rise at all hours to note down new ideas. It was not unnatural in the fellow-labourer to request him to "go and do his poeting elsewhere." Clare was already producing work of value, none the less. Nothing could be kept from his neighbours, who looked askance on his ways of thinking, and writing: while a candid friend to whom he showed his manuscripts directed his notice to the study of grammar. Troubled by these ill omens, he comforted himself in the often intoxicated friendship of the bad men of the village, who under the mellowing influences of old ale roared applause as he recited his ballads. This life was soon interrupted.