to escape by the window, and ran down to the water’s edge.  The stream, says our author, “was frozen over thinely,” but Miller “makes no more adoe, but venters over the haven, which is by the long bridge, as I gesse some forty yards over; yet he made nothing of it, but my hart aked when my eares heard the ise crack all the way.  When he was come unto me,” continues Armin, “I was amazed, and tooke up a brick-bat, which lay there by, and threw it, which no sooner fell upon the ise but it burst.  Was not this strange that a foole of thirty yeeres was borne of that ise which would not endure the fall of a brick-bat?”!  The fact that Robert Armin and William Shakespeare were fellow-actors at the Globe Theatre lends probability to Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps’ elucidation.

Continuing our way beyond the Crown Hotel we see on our right, below the level of the street, a quaint row of gables with little shops below quite unchanged by the present conditions of trade.  Passing onward towards the bridge we shall see to the best advantage the full effect of this most picturesque of streets.

Alas! that modern enterprise and modern requirements should have demanded the removal of such a bridge as fifty years ago spanned the stream in eight irregular arches.  Here we have convenience, but will this condone for the charm of picturesqueness and long association?  We cannot but mourn over the loss.  From the bridge we look up the river to the weir, mill and water-meadows.  On the right, by the yard not far up the stream, stood, in the troublous reign of King Stephen a castle; and from this fortress William de Beauchamp sallied forth, forcibly entered the Abbey, and carried away the goods of the Church.  But an abbot in those days was quite equal to meeting a hereditary sheriff on his own ground.  Abbot William de Andeville descended on the castle, took it, razed it to the ground, and consecrated the site as a cemetery; no vestige of either castle or cemetery now remains.  Old Bengeworth is hardly more than one long street, and there is little now to claim our attention.  On the right side of the street, set back behind some iron railings, is a school founded early in the eighteenth century by John Deacle, a man of humble origin and a native of Bengeworth, who, moving to London became a wealthy woollen draper with a shop in Saint Paul’s churchyard, and finally an Alderman of the City.  In the new church is his tomb with an elaborate effigy in the costume of the period.  Passing up the street we should turn before coming to the Talbot Inn and look back:  from this point the irregular houses and roofs with the Bell Tower rising beyond make an attractive vignette.  The old churchyard can be seen behind the Talbot Inn.  The church is gone in favour of the modern and “handsome” structure which we saw before us as we turned out of the main street.  Here are only the graves and the base of the old tower.  Opposite the remains of the tower is an old stone house, once the manor, where a little chapel can still be seen in an upper room.  Except the monument to John Deacle there is nothing in the new church to call forth our interest.