"IT WAS HERE," I SAID, REVERENTLY, "THAT THE SWAN OF AVON WAS HATCHED!"
Afterwards we proceeded to the Birthplace, where a very gentlewomanly female exhibited the apartment in which the Infant Bard first saw the light. Alack! there was but little light to behold, being a shockingly low and dingy room, meagrely furnished with two chairs and a table, on which was another of the busts. As I came in, I uttered a remark which I had prepared for the occasion. "It was here," I said, reverently, "here that the Swan of Avon was hatched!" At which Miss Wee-Wee was again overcome by emotion.
The room was greatly in the necessity of whitewash, being black with smoke and signatures in lead pencil. Even the window-panes were scratched all over by diamonds, on seeing which, and being also the possessor of a diamond and gold ring, I was about to inscribe my own name, but was prevented by the lady custodian.
I indignantly and eloquently protested that if Hon'ble Sirs, Walter Scott, Lord Byron, Isaac Walton, Washington Irving and Co. were permitted to deface the glass thus, surely I, who was a graduate of Calcutta University, and a valuable contributor to London Punch, was equally entitled, since what was sauce for a goose was sauce for a gander, and Mrs Allbutt-Innett urged that I was a distinguished Shakspearian student and Indian prince, but the custodian responded that she couldn't help that, for it was ultra vires, nevertheless.
However, while she was engaged in pointing out the spot where somebody's signature had been before it was peeled away, I, snatching the opportunity behind her back, did triumphantly inscribe my autograph on the bust's nose.
In the back-room they showed us where Shakspeare's father stapled his wool, which caused Mrs Allbutt-Innett to remark that she had always understood that the poet was of quite humble origin, and that, for her part, she thought it was all the more creditable to him to have done what he did do.
We also inspected the Museum, and were shown Shakspeare's jug, a rather ordinary concern; the identical dial which one of the clowns in his plays drew out of a poke, and a ring with W. S. engraved on it, found in the churchyard some years ago, and, no doubt, dropped there by the poet himself, while absorbed in the composition of his famous and world-renowned elegy.