edations, the old sexton kept watch over the place for two
days, until the vault was finished, and the aperture closed again. He told
me that he had made bold to look in at the hole, but could see neither
coffin nor bones; nothing but dust. It was something, I thought, to have
seen the dust of Shakespeare.

I had now visited the usual objects of a pilgrim's devotion, but I had a
desire to see the old family seat of the Lucy's at Charlecot, and to
ramble through the park where Shakespeare, in company with some of the
roisterers of Stratford, committed his youthful offense of deer-stealing.
The old mansion of Charlecot and its surrounding park still remain in the
possession of the Lucy family, and are peculiarly interesting from being
connected with this whimsical but eventful circumstance in the scanty
history of the bard. As the house stood at little more than three miles'
distance from Stratford, I resolved to pay it a pedestrian visit, that I
might stroll leisurely through some of those scenes from which Shakespeare
must have derived his earliest ideas of rural imagery.

My route for a part of the way lay in sight of the Avon, which made a
variety of the most fanciful doublings and windings through a wide and
fertile valley; sometimes glittering from among willows, which fringed its
borders; sometimes disappearing among groves, or beneath green banks; and
sometimes rambling out into full view, and making an azure sweep around a
slope of meadow land. This beautiful bosom of country is called the Vale
of the Red Horse. A distant line of undulating blue hills seems to be its
boundary, while all the soft intervening landscape lies in a manner
enchained in the silver links of the Avon.

After pursuing the road for about three miles, I turned off into a
foot-path, which led along the borders of fields and under hedgerows to a
private gate of the park; there was a stile, however, for the benefit of
the pedestrian; there being a public right of way through the grounds. I
delight in these hospitable estates, in which everyone has a kind of
property--at least as far as the foot-path is concerned. I now found
myself among noble avenues of oaks and elms, whose vast size bespoke the
growth of centuries. The wind sounded solemnly among their branches, and
the rooks cawed from their hereditary nests in the tree tops. The eye
ranged through a long lessening vista, with nothing to interrupt the view
but a distant statue, and a vagra