We wondered if the walls
would ever be whitewashed again, and this thought might have occurred to
Sir Walter Scott when he scratched his name with a diamond on one of the
window panes. It was at another house in the town that Shakespeare wrote
his plays and planted a mulberry-tree in the garden. This mulberry-tree
used to be one of the objects of interest at Stratford, nearly every
pilgrim who arrived there going to see it. There came a time when the
house and garden changed hands, and were sold to a clergyman named
Gastrell, who we were sorry to learn was a countryman of ours, as he
belonged to Cheshire. He had married a "lady of means," who resided at
Lichfield, and they bought this house and garden, we supposed, so that
they might "live happily ever afterwards"; but the parson, who must have
had a very bad temper, was so annoyed at people continually calling to
see the mulberry-tree that he cut it down. It was probably owing to this
circumstance that he had a furious quarrel with the Corporation of
Stratford because they raised the rates on his property. When he
complained that they were excessive and the surveyor insisted on their
being paid, Gastrell ended the matter by pulling the house down to the
ground, and leaving the neighbourhood, so we supposed it was then a case
of--
Where he's gone and how he fares
Nobody knows and nobody cares.
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