as they brought home baskets of the flower-heads for their mother to make into cowslip wine.
Spring, in this Stratford country, is exquisite. The woods are carpeted with primroses and wild hyacinths; while in the "merry month of May" the nightingale swarms among the hawthorn trees white with blossom.
On every village green there stood a painted May pole—one is still standing at Weston, near Stratford; and May-Day is still kept in Warwickshire with a "May feast" upon old May-Day, the 12th of May. Every one knows how the prettiest girl in the village was chosen Queen o' the May, and how all joined in the "Whitsun Morris-dance."
A BUNCH OF COWSLIPS.
Long Marston,—"Dancing Marston," as it has been called ever since Shakspere's time,—a few miles from Stratford, was famous till within the memory of man for a troop of Morris-dancers, who went about from village to village, strangely dressed, to dance at all the feasts. Shakspere probably had the Marston dancers in his mind when he wrote of the "three carters, three shepherds, three neat-herds, three swine-herds," that made themselves all "men of hair," and called themselves "Saltiers," at the sheep-shearing feast which pretty Perdita presided over, in "The Winter's Tale." The sheep-shearing feast, which came when roses were out on the hedges and in the gardens, must have been a merry and important time for the Shakspere boys. John Shakspere was, of course, specially interested in the price of a tod of wool, for wool-stapling was part of his trade. Perhaps William himself was sent by his mother to buy the groceries for the feast, and stood conning the list as he makes the clown do, in "The Winter's Tale."
In the spring-time, too, came the peddler with all his wonders and treasures:
"Lawn as white as driven snow;
Cypress black as e'er was crow;
Gloves as sweet as damask roses;
Masks for faces and for noses."
Those last must have pleased the little boys more than all the rest of the peddler's goods. And perhaps it was from this very peddler that Will Shakspere bought the pair of gloves which, after the fashion of the day, he gave to Anne Hathaway at their betrothal.
But the great event of the year in the quiet country town was Stratford "Mop" or statute fair, on the 12th of October. The market-place was filled, as it is to this day, with clowns and mountebanks, wrestlers, and rope-dancers at their "rope-tricks." Oxen and sheep were roasted whole. A roaring trade was driven by quack doctors and dentists. All the servants in the country came and stood around to be hired, as the farm-hands and the maids for the farm-houses still do—the carters with a bit of whipcord in their hats; the shepherds with a lock of wool; the laborers with a straw. And next day, we need not doubt, there were many candidates for the town stocks, as there are now for the police court. There were bear-baitings, too, and bull-baitings—those cruel sports which have only been abolished in Warwickshire within the last hundred years. But in Shakspere's day bear-baiting was a popular and refined amusement. During Queen Elizabeth's visit to Kenilworth, in 1575, there was a great bear-baiting in her honor, of which a curious and most sickening account still exists. And when Shakspere went to London his lodgings were close to the bear-garden, or "Bear's College," at Southwark, whither all London flocked to see the poor beasts tormented and tortured.