made progress enough to receive on leaving the warm praise of the
schoolmaster, and the advice to continue at a nightschool--which he
did. His aim, he notes later on, was to write copperplate: but there
are evidences that he learned much more than penmanship. Out of school
he appears to have been a happy, imaginative child: as alert for mild
mischief as the rest of the village boys, but with something solitary
and romantic in his disposition. One day indeed at a very early age he
went off to find the horizon; and a little later while he tended sheep
and cows in his holiday-time on Helpston Common, he made friends with
a curious old lady called Granny Bains, who taught him old songs and
ballads. Such poems as "Childhood" and "Remembrances" prove that
Clare's early life was not mere drudgery and despair. "I never had
much relish for the pastimes of youth. Instead of going out on the
green at the town end on winter Sundays to play football I stuck to
my corner stool poring over a book; in fact, I grew so fond of being
alone at last that my mother was fain to force me into company, for
the neighbours had assured her mind ... that I was no better than
crazy.... I used to be very fond of fishing, and of a Sunday morning
I have been out before the sun delving for worms in some old
weed-blanketed dunghill and steering off across the wet grain ... till
I came to the flood-washed meadow stream.... And then the year used
to be crowned with its holidays as thick as the boughs on a harvest
home." It is probable that the heavy work which he is said to have
done as a child was during the long holiday at harvesttime. When he
was twelve or thirteen he certainly became team-leader, and in this
employment he saw a farm labourer fall from the top of his loaded
wagon and break his neck. For a time his reason seemed affected by the
sight.

At evening-school, Clare struck up a friendship with an excise-man's