constituted the ordinary daily food of people in the position of Clare's
parents, and they thought themselves happy when able to get a piece of
wheaten bread, with perhaps a small morsel of pork, on Sundays. At this
height of comfort, however, Parker Clare and his wife seldom arrived.
Sickly from his earliest childhood, Parker Clare had never been really
able to perform the work required of him, though using his greatest
efforts to do so. A few years after marriage, his infirmities increased
to such an extent that he was compelled to seek relief from the parish,
and henceforth he remained more or less a pauper for life.
Notwithstanding this low position, Parker Clare did not cease to care for
the well-being of his family, and, by the greatest privations on his own
part, managed to send his son to an infant school. The school in question
was kept by a Mrs. Bullimore, and of the most primitive kind. In the
winter time, all the little ones were crowded together in a narrow room;
but as soon as the weather got warm, the old dame turned them out into
the yard, where the whole troop squatted down on the ground. The teaching
of Mrs. Bullimore did not make much impression upon little John, except a
slight fact which she accidentally told him, and which took such firm
hold of his imagination that he remembered it all his life. There was a
white-thorn tree in the school-yard, of rather large size, and the
ancient schoolmistress told John that she herself, when young, had
planted the tree, having carried the root from the fields in her pocket.
The story struck the boy as something marvellous; it was to him a sort of
revelation of nature, a peep into the mysteries of creation at the works
of which he looked with feelings of unutterable amazement, not unmixed
with awe. But there was little else that Mrs. Bullimore could teach John
Clare, either in her schoolroom or in the yard. The instruction of the
good old woman was, in the main, confined to two things--the initiation
into the difficulties of A B C, and the reading from two books, of which
she was the happy possessor. These books were 'The Death of Abel' and