In 1613, in
Standish, in Lancashire, a maiden child was born having four legs, four
arms, and one head with two faces--the one before, the other behind, like
the picture of Janus. (One thinks of the prodigies that presaged the
birth of Glendower.) Also, the same year, in Hampshire, a carpenter,
lying in bed with his wife and a young child, "was himself and the childe
both burned to death with a sudden lightning, no fire appearing outwardly
upon him, and yet lay burning for the space of almost three days till he
was quite consumed to ashes." This year the Globe playhouse, on the
Bankside, was burned, and the year following the new playhouse, the
Fortune, in Golding Lane, "was by negligence of a candle, clean burned
down to the ground." In this year also, 1614, the town of
Stratford-on-Avon was burned. One of the strangest events, however,
happened in the first year of Elizabeth (1558), when "dyed Sir Thomas
Cheney, Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports, of whom it is reported for a
certain, that his pulse did beat more than three quarters of an hour
after he was dead, as strongly as if he had been still alive." In 1580 a
strange apparition happened in Somersetshire--three score personages all
clothed in black, a furlong in distance from those that beheld them; "and
after their appearing, and a little while tarrying, they vanished away,
but immediately another strange company, in like manner, color, and
number appeared in the same place, and they encountered one another and
so vanished away.
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