Recovering himself after a while, the fairies then let him alone, and he
staggered home to the 'Blue Bell,' pale and trembling, and like one in a
dream. His good friend and master, Francis Gregory, wondering at the
haggard look of the lad, thought he was going to have another attack of
the tertiary ague, and spoke to his parents; but John, in his silent
mood, said it was nothing, and begged to be left alone. So they let him
have his way, and he continued his weekly errands to Maxey, with the same
result as before. At last, when thoroughly wearied of this repetition of
supernatural terrors, he hit upon an ingenious plan for breaking the
chain connecting him with the invisible world. The plan consisted in
concocting, on his own part, a story of wonders; a story, however, 'with
no ghost in it.' Now a king, and now a prince--in turn a sailor, a
soldier, and a traveller in unknown lands--John himself was always the
hero of his own story, and, of course, always the lucky hero. With his
vast power of imagination, this calling up of a new world of bright
fancies to destroy the lawless apparitions of the air had the desired
effect, and the ghosts troubled John Clare no more on his way to and from
the mill.

Nevertheless, his constant reading of fairy tales, with incessant play on
the imagination and surexcitation of the mind, was not without leaving
its ill effect upon the bodily frame. John sickened and weakened visibly,
and his general appearance became the talk of the village. His long
solitary roamings through the woods and fields, his habits of reading
even when tending the cattle, and his apparent dislike to hold converse
with any one, were things which the poor labourers, young and old, could
not understand; and when, as it happened, people met him on the road to
Maxey in the dark, and heard that he was talking to himself in a loud
excited manner, they set him down as a lunatic. Some few of the coarsest
among the youngsters went so far as to greet him with volleys of abuse