blind, so the story runs, was effectual, and the soldiers departed.* There is a footpath across the fields to Pebworth. The corn about here is still uncut, although both stalk and ears are of a deep orange, and wave across the country like a molten sea of gold. Very sweet now is the walk through the fields by the hedgeside, where the briony, with its deep bright green leaves, is climbing the hedge, covered with its clusters of berries, and where the long bramble shoots and sprays stretch over the path, still blossomed with gray and pink flowers, and the ditch is matted with heriff and tanglegrass and ladies' bedstraw, and the first dewberry, with which Titania feeds Bottom, shows its dark purple berry silvered over with a delicate frost-like bloom. A few fields bring us to "Piping Pebworth," which still keeps up its reputation for music. There is nothing to detain us here. And, so rambling over more fields, we reach the old Roman Icknield Street, which will lead us across the Avon into Bidford, still, I believe, as famous as ever for its love for good ale. Here at the Falcon, now turned into a poorhouse, is a room still shown as the scene of the famous festivity. Following the Stratford road for about a mile, we shall reach on the right-hand side, the * For the more authentic account, see The Boscobel Tracts, edited by J. Hughes. London, 1857. place where the crab-tree stood. It perished from natural decay in 1824, and nothing marks its site but an old gatepost. However, the view from here will well repay us. Before us spreads the vale of Evesham, the most fertile, perhaps, in England. The country here, which is always earlier than any other, is now in the middle of harvest. A fresh breeze, though, is blowing, here and there in play knocking down a sheaf, as if it were a huge nine-pin, and rustling the crab-apples down from the hedge-row trees, and blowing about the young second broods of birds that are taking their first lessons in flying; but, best of all, breathing cool upon the brows of the toiling harvestmen, and the poor harvestwomen, their backs aching with picking up the bundles after the reapers, whilst the Avon flows so silently down the valley. The other places mentioned in the rhyme are all mere villages. Broom is called " beggarly," both from the poverty of its soil and its inhabitants; and "Papist" Wixford, still, I believe, belongs to the old Roman Catholic family of the Throckmortons. "Haunted", Hillborough is now a mere farmhouse by the river-side, quite lonely enough to have the credit for being haunted It was formerly an old manor-house, and is but little changed from what it was in Shakspere's time, with its old barns, and its old round-stone dove-house. "Dodging" 66 Exhall, as I venture to write, instead of the usual “ dadging" Exhall, is, I must suppose, so called on account of the trouble there is to find it. I know that the first time that I went there, I was several hours before I could reach the place, and then, to use an Hibernicism, never found it; unless two or three straggling cottages make the village. The prettiest place of them all is "Hungry" Grafton, or Temple-Grafton, as it is also called, where some of the old Knights Templar once lived. But where their dwelling was, there is nothing now but a farmhouse standing very prettily amongst its elms, and you may trace by the mounds and hollows in the adjoining meadow, where had once been the fishpools of the old Knights. The epithet "hungry" is still true of the soil, which is very poor; and a farm in the parish, to this day, bears the name of Hungry Arbour Farm. There is little to be seen in the village but a few houses built of the blue lias stone of the district. We will go on. A quiet village footpath through the meadows, by the side of a brook, which flows down to the Avon, will bring us out into the Stratford road.* But it is not these places alone that should interest us. It is the whole country. And as we go on to Stratford, *For those who take a greater interest in the tradition of the Crab-tree than I can persuade myself to feel, a work has been published, entitled, The Legend of Shakspere's Crab-tree, by C. F. Green. London, 1857. let us now and then stop, and look back, and watch the Autumn sunset fading behind us upon this our last walk, as Shakspere often must have seen it; flake upon flake of cloud burning with fire behind the Binton Hills, and casting their rosy shadows to the far East, as if there another sunrise was dawning upon us instead of night. And let us, too, rising from Shakspere even up to higher things, remember, with some of that feeling of patriotism which so marks his plays, that this was the land, where at Edgehill, the first battle in the great struggle for English liberty was fought, in His native county, which so brave spirits hath bred. |