Page:St. Nicholas (serial) (IA stnicholasserial132dodg).pdf/18



with red wheat, Davy,” or grumbled over the “smith’s note for shoeing and plough-irons,” or told the latest turn in the quarrel between “William Visor of Woncot”? and “Clement Perkes of the Hill” Very likely the little hazel-eyed boys took William Visor’s part, though they wisely kept their opinions to themselves, since small boys in that period were not allowed the liberty of speech they enjoy in these degenerate times. William Visor was a neighbor of the Ardens, and possibly a friend of “Marian Hackett, the fat ale-wife of Wincot”; for Wincot, Woncot, and Wilmcote are all the same place. Or perhaps the young lads sided with Clement Perkes, for the Hill where he lived at Weston was known as Cherry Orchard Farm, a name full of tempting suggestions to little boys. And we know that Shakspere, like many less wise people, was fond of “ripe red cherries.” He mentions them again and again. He and Gilbert, and their little friends the Sadlers and Harts and Halls, must haye played bob-cherry, as we do now,— drawing up the stem of the cherry with our tongues, and, with a sudden snap, getting the round, ripe fruit between our lips,—and then have used the stones for “cherry-pit”—a child’s game that is frequently mentioned by Shakspere and other old writers, which consisted in pitching cherry-stones into a small hole.

Stratford lies just at the beginning of the fruit-growing country, which stretches right down the Vale of Evesham to Worcester and the Severn; and little Will Shakspere was well versed in the merits of all kinds of fruits. There were the plum-trees, that make you think in the spring-time that a snow-shower has fallen upon a sunny day all over the Stratford district; while in the autumn the branches are laden with “the mellow plum.” Who can doubt that little Will climbed the damson-tree, “with danger of my life,” as he said later that Simpcox did at his wife’s-bidding? In the plays he mentions apples of many sorts—some of which, though rare or extinct in other parts of England, still grow about his native place—the bitter-sweetings and leather-coats, the apple-johns and the pomewaters. Many a time he must have stood with all the boys of the place watching, as we might do to-day, the cider-making on some village green, when the heaps of apples, red, green, and yellow, ave brought in barrows and baskets and carts from the orchards, and ground up into a thick yellow pulp in the crushing-mill turned by a horse, and that pulp is put into presses from which the clear juice runs into tubs, while the dry cakes of pulp are carted away to fatten the pigs.

There were grapes, too, growing plentifully in Warwickshire in his day; and “apricocks,” “ripe figs. and mulberries,” like those with which the fairies were told to feed Bottom the weaver. Blackberries and the handsome purple dewberries grew