followed it both in Germany and other countries.  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.  And the third time appeared that number again, all in bright armour, and encountered one another, and so vanished away.  This was examined before Sir George Norton, and sworn by four honest men that saw it, to be true.”  Equally well substantiated, probably, was what happened in Herefordshire in 1571:  “A field of three acres, in Blackmore, with the Trees and Fences, moved from its place and passed over another field, traveling in the highway that goeth to Herne, and there stayed.”  Herefordshire was a favorite place for this sort of exercise of nature.  In 1575 the little town of Kinnaston was visited by an earthquake:  “On the seventeenth of February at six o’clock of the evening, the earth began to open and a Hill with a Rock under it (making at first a great bellowing noise, which was heard a great way off) lifted itself up a great height, and began to travel, bearing along with it the Trees that grew upon it, the Sheep-folds, and Flocks of Sheep abiding there at the same time.  In the place from whence it was first moved, it left a gaping distance forty foot broad, and fourscore Ells long; the whole Field was about twenty Acres.  Passing along, it overthrew a Chappell standing in the way, removed an Ewe-Tree planted in the Churchyard, from the West into the East; with the like force it thrust before it High-wayes, Sheep-folds, Hedges, and Trees, made Tilled ground Pasture, and again turned Pasture into Tillage.  Having walked in this sort from Saturday in the evening, till Monday noon, it then stood still.”  It seems not improbable that Birnam wood should come to Dunsinane.