well remember! Dame Nature was just donning
her variegated gown of rustic-brown, while fitful airs from the realms of
Jack Frost were painting the wild roses and forest leaves in cardinal hue,
and the blackbird, thrush and musical nightingale flew low and sang hoarse,
but continually, in their assemblages for migration to lands of sun and
flowers.

From Kenilworth to Coventry the rural scenery is as various and beautiful
as visions of a dream, and the undulating landscape by hill and dale, field
and forest, river, marge, cottage, hall, church and castle, grouping
themselves in shifting pictures of beauty and grandeur, where lofty elms
and sycamores rise and bend their willowy arms to the passing breeze,
indelibly impresses the beholder with a splendid kaleidoscopic view of
English hospitality and agricultural cultivation.

The tall turrets of monasteries, castles and soaring church spires of
Coventry looked luminous in the morning sunshine, while the brazen tongues
of century bells rolled their mellifluous matin tones in voluminous welcome
to the great multitude of revelers within her embattled walls and
hospitable homes.

Promptly at nine o'clock in the morning, in the Leicester Park, twenty-five
accoutered long bow men, in archery uniform, took their stand before the
bull's eye targets two hundred yards away.

At the words "draw," "aim" and "fly" the whizzing arrows centered and
shivered in the oak targets, and none hit the bull's but Will Shakspere of
Stratford, who was proclaimed winner of the first prize, an ox, a barrel of
sack and butt of wine, with the privilege of kissing every girl in the
county.

The entire day was spent in all kinds of sports, and with roasts, joints,
bread, pudding, sack, ale, gin, brandy and whiskey, the revelers did not
break up until daylight, when all were laid under the table but William and
his friends Burbage, Condell and Dick Field, who had come away from his
printing house in London to witness one of the greatest rural sports of
England.

Although Stratford was not a day's walk from Coventry, William and his
friends did not succeed in getting back for three days, and often they
traveled by the light of the moon believing it was the sun in midday
splendor.

Anne Hathaway heard of William's official and social victory, not in the
proud light of his Stratford and Shottery alehouse companions, but with a
tongue like a gad, she proposed to lash him into shame as a husband or
d