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SKIPPING FOR A YOUNG MAN.Closely allied to the custom of forecasting the future by means of the horned grass and the bouncing ball, is the equally interesting performance of, what I may call, skipping for a young man. The humour of this custom lies in the fact that it appears to be prearranged. The country girl of an Arden village or hamlet has seen a young man whose name she knows, and for whom she may have conceived a tender passion. That is enough foundation for her to build a romance upon, and forthwith out comes the skipping-rope, with the tinkling bells attached to the handles, and the performance is gone through with all the zest of a religious belief.

If the favoured one's name should be Silvius, 'S' is the letter which fixes itself in the mind of the searcher for a young man, and Sweet Audrey commences to skip to find out whether he will really be her young man according to the Rite of the Rope. The correct formula is to skip standing, repeating the while a quaint jingle, common with the children in isolated villages in Shakespeare's greenwood:

'Black currant, red currant, strawberry jam,

Tell me the name of my young man

ABCD-'

and so on, rehearsing the letters of the alphabet; and when the rope catches under the skipper's foot at the letter of the desired one's name, then it has told her truly (what, indeed, she made it tell); and the maiden's heart thereafter is as light and dancing as her tripping feet. This rite may appear slightly Pagan, but it is very pretty, and when performed, as I have seen it in many a secluded village of Shakespeare's own Arden, by a sweet and modish little girl with blue eyes and flaming hair, it gives just that one touch of romance to country life which is necessary to make it enjoyable to the young flowers of humanity, in an age so reputedly unsentimental as the twentieth century.

THE WISHING TREE.-Actual customs, events, and performances are not very widely divided from their legendary associations in Shakespeare's greenwood. The difficulty is to see the division. While there may be elements of innocuous

Paganism in the Songs of the Bees, and the Adoration of the Warwickshire sheep for their Shepherd, there is but the fringe of a suggestion of it in the visit to 'The Wishing Tree,' which is a custom pure and simple, and as delightful as it is simple and pure. It is not exactly Tree-Worship, though considering the still leafy character of the Arden Woodland, it is surprising that tree-worship is not common there; it is a sort of regarding a tree, as Shakespeare himself regarded it, as a living thing, a sacred thing; and placing unbounded confidence in its numerous virtues.

'The Wishing Tree' is usually an elm, for which Warwickshire is everywhere famous, set in a position at once romantic and approachable; and, in the popular imagination, unspoken desires may be realised if wished for beneath its branches. Rustic maidens in love are the chief visitants, and as the spring season is considered the most favourable one in matters of love, courtship, and the tying of hymeneal knots, the light of a spring morning often sees the round forms of Audrey and Phoebe sidling furtively, by separate

ways, down to the Wishing Tree. It is the modern idea, so to speak, of appealing to the Oracle, and to judge by the bright, unclouded faces of the Warwickshire lasses, when they return from the tree, their unspoken desires are in a fair way of realisation.

In Shakespeare's Arden, then, at least, the 'Merrie England' of the past is the 'Merrie England' still; and it is because the scenes, dialect, and customs of the Poet's days are still in observance in his greenwood to-day that I have included some account of them in this book; for I am native here, am a countryman of Shakespeare's, and know and love the many things which he knew and loved when he was native here.

V

STRATFORD-ON-AVON: THE LITERARY MECCA OF THE WORLD

'I know a bank whereon the wild thyme grows,
Where ox-lips and the nodding violet blows;
Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine,
With sweet musk-roses, and with eglantine.'

A Midsummer-Night's Dream (Act II. Scene ii.)

THIS bank, about which Shakespeare speaks so lovingly and poetically in the lines quoted above, is undoubtedly the northern bank of the Avon at Stratfordon-Avon, where, from its rising on the Battlefield of Naseby, in Northamptonshire, it meanders gracefully on until, at the Poet's town, it broadens out into a beautiful and entrancing stream, fringed with foxglove and the wild flowers he mentions; a stream full of poetry and teeming with romance, upon which at about eight miles' distance by road from the famous Elizabethan town of Warwick, stands that quaint little market town, with its irregular streets and picturesque dwellings, where Shakespeare was bornthe Literary Mecca of the World.

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