The black thorn was in its blossom & the soldiers were reminded of their early days & one of them said in such a spot as this comrade I tended sheep & have been delighted at seeing the black thorn in blossom as the earnest of may day a coming when we should play at crookhorn & duck under-water & pelt over the garland -- & I little thought then of where I should ramble & what I should see -- these days Richard are all over & our happiness is gone after them for some other boys to pick up & loose agen as we did --
& so they wandered along shortning the way by little remembrances of former days that the scene around them brought up in their minds -- untill the sun went to bed as red as a drunken man dropping as if in the midst of the waste that surrounded them & they were astonished in the seeming boundless stretch of the common which like an ocean of waste seemed to have no shore of termination to human existance & no harbours of comfortable cottages -- for they had not only been out of the sight of smoaking chimneys for hours but had even lost all sight of human existance in the shape of foot paths or waggon tracks –
From Clare's 'The Two Soldiers' an episode in his aborted novel from the 1820s, now published with Clare’s title “The Memoirs of Uncle Barnaby" (Arbour Editions, 2017).
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