It was now about noon, and they were feeling rather hungry, so at a short distance from Charlecote they selected an inviting place by the roadside, and there they unpacked the lunch which Mrs. Pitt had brought. How good it did taste! They all thoroughly enjoyed the picnic, and when a scarlet automobile went rushing past them, the ladies’ veils fluttering in the breeze, Betty merely remarked:—“An auto’s lovely, of course, but to-day I’d rather have a bicycle. It seems more appropriate, somehow.”
“Yes,” Mrs. Pitt responded. “When you are in such a beautiful county as this, and want to see it well, a bicycle is best. And then, I think it is more respectful to Shakespeare to go through his beloved haunts at a fairly leisurely pace. I imagine that he never would have understood how any one could care so little for Warwickshire as to go whirling and jiggling along through it in a motor, at thirty miles an hour.”
Betty had absent-mindedly picked a daisy from the tall grass in which she was sitting, and was pulling off its petals, reciting the little verse about:
“Rich man,
Poor man,
Beggar man,
Thief.”
“Oh, dear! It’s thief!” she cried, making up a wry face. “I’d rather have any one than that!”
“Try the other verses,” suggested Barbara, entering into the fun.
“What others?” asked Betty in much surprise. “I didn’t know there were any more.”
“Dear me, yes,” Mrs. Pitt broke in. “I used to know several of them myself,—the one about the house:
‘Big house,
Little house,
Pig-stye,
Barn,’
and about the conveyances: