toes. Where fun was to be found William raised the auction and the
highest bidder at the booths of vanity fair. He was athletic in mind and
body, and forever like a cribbed lion or caged eagle, struggled to shake
off his rural environments and dash away into the world of thought and
action.

Home, with its practical, daily gad grind morality and responsibility, had
no charm for William, and his stalwart wife made matters worse by her
continual importunities to her vagabond husband to settle down with the
muttonhead clodhoppers and tradesmen of Warwickshire. He was not built that
way!

Her farm logic fell upon deaf ears, for while she was preaching hard work
he was reading the love-lit flights of Ovid and pondering over the sugared
sonnets of Petrarch and Sir Philip Sidney, living in the realms of Clio,
Euterpe and Terpsichore, preparing even then his pathway to the great
poems of Venus and Adonis, Lucrece, the sonnets and the immortal plays that
were incubating in the procreant soul of the Divine Bard. He was his own
schoolmaster, drawing daily draughts from the universal fountains of
Nature.

And what a blessing it is to the public to have even a social scapegrace
hatch out golden ideas for their education and amusement, notwithstanding
the neglect of farm and family!

The greatest good to the greatest number is best for all time.

_"God moves in a mysterious way,
His wonders to perform,
He plants His footsteps in the sea
And rides upon the storm."_

On the first of September, 1586, the lord high sheriff of Coventry invited
the people to an archery and drinking contest.

Representatives from twenty-five villages and towns were selected, from the
various working guilds and professions, to conquer or die (drunk) in the
Queen's name for the honor of Old Albion.

Ceres, the Goddess of Harvest, had showered her riches on the fields and
forests of Warwickshire, and to glorify her abundance, a great athletic and
semimilitary carnival was thus given by the authorities to test the
bravery, endurance and greatness of the sons of Saint George and the
Dragon.

The beautiful, broad, undulating, winding highways, leading from Stratford,
Warwick, Kenilworth and Birmingham to the ancient town of Coventry were
filled with jolly pilgrims to pay devotion at the shrine of Hercules and
Bacchus, with the influence of Venus as an ever-present incentive to
passionate pleasure.

That bright September morning I