father's cottage, some four miles off. Thither accordingly went John
Clare, in an ecstacy of delight; feeling as if in heaven and playing
merry gypsy-tunes to the winged angels. He wished the four miles were
four hundred; and when arrived at the paternal door with his fair
companion, and she told him that he must leave her now, it seemed to him
as if it had been but a minute since he met her. He looked utterly
dejected; but brightened up when she told him that her name was Martha
Turner, that her father was a cottage farmer, and that the place where
they were standing was called Walkherd Lodge--which perhaps, she
whispered, he would find again. It sounded as if the fiddle under his arm
was again making music to the bright angels. John Clare was in heaven;
but the poor lime-burners at Stamford did not think so, that evening,
when they had to dance without a fiddle.

After seeing his sweet companion disappear behind the garden-gate; after
hearing the door of the house open and shut, and watching the movement of
the lights within the house for an hour or two, John Clare at last turned
his back upon Walkherd Lodge, and went the way he came. The road he
trotted along, with his feet on good Rutlandshire soil, but his head
still somewhat in the clouds, got gradually more and more narrow, till it
ended at a broad ditch, with, a dungheap on the one side and a haystack
on the other. It was now that John perceived for the first time that he
had lost his way. While walking along with Martha Turner, he no more
thought of marking the road than of solving riddles in algebra, and,
besides a faint consciousness that he was coming somewhere from the east
and going to the west, he was utterly lost in his topography. However,
under the circumstances, it seemed no great matter to John to lose his
way, and rather pleasant than otherwise to sleep in a haystack within a
mile of the dwelling of Martha Turner. On the haystack, accordingly, he
sat down with great inward satisfaction, and, the moon having just risen,