Chapel Lane, which bounded one side of the New Place estate, was one of the filthiest thoroughfares of the town, the general sanitary condition of which (see page 25 above) was bad enough. A streamlet ran through it, the water of which turned a mill, alluded to in town records of that period. This water-course gradually became "a shallow fetid ditch, an open receptacle of sewage and filth." It continued to be a nuisance for at least two centuries more. A letter written in 1807, in connection with a lawsuit, gives some interesting reminiscences of it. "I very well remember," says the writer, "the ditch you mention forty-five years, as after my sister was married, which was in October, 1760, I was very often at Stratford, and was very well acquainted both with the ditch and the road in question;--the ditch went from the Chapel, and extended to Smith's house;--I well remember there was a space of two or three feet from the wall in a descent to the ditch, and I do not think any part of the new wall was built on the ditch;--the ditch was the receptacle for all manner of filth that any person chose to put there, and was very obnoxious at times;--Mr. Hunt used to complain of it, and was determined to get it covered over, or he would do it at his own expense, and I do not know whether he did or not;--across, the road from the ditch to Shakespeare Garden was very hollow and always full of mud, which is now covered over, and in general there was only one wagon tract along the lane, which used to be very bad, in the winter particularly;--I do not know that the ditch was so deep as to overturn a carriage, and the road was very little used near it, unless it was to turn out for another, as there was always room enough." Thomas Cox, a carpenter, who lived in Chapel Lane from 1774, remembered that the open gutter from the Chapel to Smith's cottage "was a wide dirty ditch choked with mud, that all the filth of that part of the town ran into it, that it was four or five feet wide and more than a foot deep, and that the road sloped down to the ditch." According to other witnesses, the ditch extended to the end of the lane, where, between the roadway and the Bancroft, was a narrow creek or ditch through which the overflow from Chapel Lane no doubt found a way into the river. Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps believes that the fever which proved fatal to Shakespeare was caused by the "wretched sanitary conditions surrounding his residence"--an explanation of it which would never have occurred even to medical men in that day. PART II. HIS HOME LIFE [Illustration: SHAKESPEARE HOUSE, RESTORED] THE DWELLING-HOUSES OF THE TIME