d two or three excursions.

At eight o'clock in the morning we gathered in the parlor in the Red Horse
Hotel, at Stratford-on-Avon. Two pictures of Washington Irving, the chair
in which the father of American literature sat, and the table on which he
wrote, immortalizing his visit to that hotel, adorn the room. From thence
we sallied forth to see the clean, quaint village of Stratford. It was
built just to have Shakspeare born in. We have not heard that there was any
one else ever born there, before or since. If, by any strange possibility,
it could be proved that the great dramatist was born anywhere else, it
would ruin all the cab drivers, guides and hostelries of the place.

We went of course to the house where Shakspeare first appeared on the stage
of life, and enacted the first act of his first play. Scene the first.
Enter John Shakspeare, the father; Mrs. Shakspeare, the mother, and the old
nurse, with young William.

A very plain house it is. Like the lark, which soars highest, but builds
its nest lowest, so with genius; it has humble beginnings. I think ten
thousand dollars would be a large appraisement for all the houses where the
great poets were born. But all the world comes to this lowly dwelling.
Walter Scott was glad to scratch his name on the window, and you may see it
now. Charles Dickens, Edmund Kean, Albert Smith, Mark Lemon and Tennyson,
so very sparing of their autographs, have left their signatures on the
wall. There are the jambs of the old fire-place where the poet warmed
himself and combed wool, and began to think for all time. Here is the chair
in which he sat while presiding at the club, forming habits of drink which
killed him at the last, his own life ending in a tragedy as terrible as any
he ever wrote. Exeunt wine-bibbers, topers, grogshop keepers, Drayton, Ben
Jonson and William Shakspeare. Here also is the letter which Richard Quyney
sent to Shakspeare, asking to borrow thirty pounds. I hope he did not loan
it; for if he did, it was a dead loss.

We went to the church where the poet is buried. It dates back seven hundred
years, but has been often restored. It has many pictures, and is the
sleeping place of many distinguished dead; but one tomb within the chancel
absorbs all the attention of the stranger. For hundreds of years the world
has looked upon the unadorned stone lying flat over the dust of William
Shakspeare, and read the epitaph written by himself:

"Good friend, for Jesus'