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,
are 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.

[Footnote B: 2d Henry VI., Act 2, Scene 1.]

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 then as now, by the hedges in the
orchards and in the shade of the Weir-brake just below Stratford mill,
where, so says tradition, the scene of the "Midsummer Night's Dream" was
laid. In the Weir-brake, too, and in all the woods about their home, the
Shakspere boys must have gone nutting--that most delightful harvest of
the year, when you bend down "the hazel twig," so "straight and
slender," and fill baskets and pockets with the sweet nuts in their
rough, green husks, and crack them all the way home like so many happy
squirrels.

[Illustration: THE GUILD COUNCIL-ROOM--NOW THE HEAD-MASTER'S
CLASS-ROOM.]

All the hedge-rows were full then, as they are to this day, of wild
pear-trees, wild apples, and "crabs," as crab-apples are called in
England. Roasted "crabs" served with hot ale were a favorite Christmas
dish in Shakspere's time. And I doubt not that the boys rejoiced at the
house in Henley street as the time of year came round "when roasted
crabs hiss in the bowl."

How snug the "house-place" in the old home must have looked with its
roaring fire of logs, on winter evenings, when the two little boys of
nine and seven, and Joan and Anne, the little sisters, huddled up in the
chimney-corner with baby Richard in his cradle, while the mother
prepared hot ale and "roasted crabs" for her gossips. Will, I warrant,
as with twinkling eyes he watched Mrs. Hart or Mrs. Sadler or Mrs.
Hathaway, from Shottery, thought that it was Puck himself, the very
spirit of mischief, who had got into the bowl "in very likeness of a
roasted crab."

It must have been a recollection of those winter evenings that made
little Will, in later years, write his deligh