They were
stricken with horror, but had arrived too late to save her, as she was
now quite dead. The poor girl must have been in a trance when they
carried her to the vault, and in her agony of hunger had bitten a piece
of flesh from her own shoulder!
We found the "Golden Lion" quite a comfortable hotel, and had a
first-class tea there in the company of an actor from London, who, like
ourselves, was exploring the country hereabouts, though perhaps from a
different point of view, and who had a lot to tell us about Shakespeare
and his plays. He had been to a village named Bidford a few miles away
where there was an old-fashioned inn, in the courtyard of which
Shakespeare and his friends had acted his _Midsummer's Night Dream_ long
before it appeared in London. It was at that inn that Shakespeare on
one occasion had too much to drink, and when on his way home to
Stratford he lay down under a thorn tree to sleep off the effects; the
tree was fenced round later on in memory of that rather inglorious
event. Although we were temperance men, we had to admit that the old
inns where the stage-coaches stopped to exchange passengers and horses
had a great attraction for us, and it was not without a feeling of
regret that we found them being gradually closed throughout the country
we passed through.
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