After viewing the general features of the little town of Patrington, which, maybe, is but slightly changed since its main street was trodden by English men and English women of “the spacious days of Good Queen Bess,” I (to have recourse to the first person singular, if the liberty may be pardoned) went in search of some ancient hostelry such as wherein “Jack Wright, Kit Wright, and Tom Percy,” then in the hey-day of their youthful strength and vigour, quaffed the foaming tankard of the nut-brown ale, or called for their pint of sack, when William Shakespeare[A] was the Sir Henry Irving of his day, and was writing his immortal dramas for all Nations and all Time. [Footnote A: The common consent of mankind ranks Shakespeare, along with Homer and Dante, as one of the world’s three Poet-Kings.] Such a house of entertainment “for man and beast” I found in the inn bearing the time-honoured and sportsmanlike sign of the “Dog and Duck”. On entering the portals of this ancient hostelry the historic imagination enabled me to conjure up the sight of some of the gentlemen who, three hundred years ago, must have formed the company who assembled at the “Dog and Duck;” to discuss, maybe, a threatened Spanish invasion of England’s inviolate shores; “a progress” of the great Tudor Queen; or the action of her Privy Counsellors, Lord Burleigh, Sir Francis Walsingham, the Earl of Leicester, Sir Robert Cecil, Sir Walter Raleigh, and the ill-fated Robert Devereux Earl of Essex; or, belike, to sound the praises of that model of chivalry, Sir Philip Sidney, the General Gordon, Lord Bowen, and Matthew Arnold of his day, and the darling of his countrymen for ever. If I had to content myself with the historic imagination alone for the sight of John Wright, one of the most expert swordsmen of his time; of Christopher Wright, who was a taller man than his brother, of a closer and more peaceable disposition; and of Thomas Percy, their brother-in-law, who was agent for his cousin, the great head of the House of Percy; and also for the vision of all those high-born, courageous, but self-willed, wayward Yorkshire Elizabethan gentlemen, in their tall hat, graceful cloak,[A] and short sword girded on their side, with their tinkling falcons on their wrist, with their cross-bows and their dogs: if I had to be content with imagination alone for all this, on that Monday, the 6th day of May, 1901, I had the sight and vision in the solid reality of flesh and blood of “mine host” of the “Dog and Duck,” who bade me welcome in right cheery tones; and, in answer to my question, told me he well knew Great Plowland, in the Parish of Welwick (being a native of those parts), and ever since he was a boy he had heard tell that some of the Gunpowder plotters had been at Plowland.[B] [Footnote A: The cloak was then one of the outward tokens of a gentleman.]