OUR MONTHLY GOSSIP.
Dothegirls Hall.
Such was our name for it. But such was only our American name for an establishment which in reality bore a much more imposing title. St. John's Priory was the name we were known by in the guide-books and to all the country round about. A noble Priory we were at our front, with heavy stone walls veiled in centuries-old ivy, and gables and finials outlined against the sky; and it was only at the rear, where were our dank court-yard, our wheezing pump, a dark vista into our dirty kitchen, and where often were strident Miss Betsy and Miss Sally, that we looked our deserving the name "Dothegirls Hall."
It was in lovely Warwickshire, where green meadows sweep to the gentle Avon, which glides only a few miles away through Stratford and past Shakespeare's home. Many of our countrypeople drove past the stately front of our Priory every day, visiting, as all good Americans do, Kenilworth Castle, with Amy Robsart's story in their hands, and Coventry, with Lady Godiva on their tongues and silk book-markers on their minds.
Our brother and sister Yankees always gazed with admiration, not unmingled with awe, upon our Priory, and gushed over it to each other. For not only is it one of the most picturesque objects of a famously picturesque Elizabethan town, but it has an added interest to Americans in having been mentioned in Hawthorne's "Our Old Home."
Our countrypeople gazed upon us with admiration, little dreaming the dark secrets we had discovered concerning that impressive pile, whose peaked roofs and soaring gables sheltered monk and prior before yet our own country had a name, and in whose cavernous cellars only the bravest of the servants dared to go, lest gowned and hooded spectres should ask what her business was.
Of course to profane and worldly eyes these ghosts assumed the mean guise of empty boxes, decaying barrels and timbers, old kitchen-refuse, and such-like ghostly fowl. But there were spirits in mortal form among us imaginative enough to penetrate this sordid masquerade and to know that subterraneanly we were haunted by goblins damned, if ever a priory was since goblins and priories were invented. Our servants could not disbelieve in our delightful ghosts, we would not: hence we found our Priory as stimulative to the historic, poetic, and supernatural imagination as it was shocking to our moral sense and inflammatory to our tempers.
But these last two effects resulted from a rear knowledge of St. John's; our front view was always worthy of picture and poem, having wide portals, over which was the date of their last repair in 1622, humped Tudor gables, and mullioned windows set with diamond panes.
St. John's belongs to a noble earl, whose castle overhangs the Avon only a stone's throw away. As is so often the case in England, it has been occupied by the same family for more than a hundred years, the family never owning stick or stone of it, but paying regular rent, as if here to-day and gone to-morrow, like the tenants of a city flat. The grandfather of the present occupants brought his bride here and here raised a numerous family. Of that family no representatives now live save two grand-daughters, the shrill and strident spinsters who made us so often forego our more impressive title to call ourselves after the flourishing institution made immortal by the deathless Squeers.