and a writer of
masterly poems and plays.

Perhaps if you were the tinker, you might be tired enough with your
tramping to throw off your pack, and, sitting upon it, to talk with the
little lad; or, if you were the knight, it might please your worship to
breathe your horse upon the bridge and hold a moment's converse with the
child.

Were you tinker or knight the time would not be misspent, for you would
find young Hamnet Shakespeare most entertaining.

He would tell you of his twin sister Judith--something of a "tomboy," I
fear, but a pretty and lovable little girl, nevertheless. And as Hamnet
told you about Judith, you would remember--no, you would not, though,
for neither tinker nor knight nor any other Englishman of 1595 knew what
we do to-day of Shakespeare's plays; but if you should happen to have a
dream of the little fellow now, you might remember that Shakespeare's
twins must have been often in the great writer's mind; for they stole
into his work repeatedly in such shapes as that charming brother and
sister of his _Twelfth Night_--Sebastian and Viola--

"An apple cleft in two is not more twin
Than these two creatures,"

or the twin brothers Antipholus of Ephesus and Syracuse, and those very,
very funny twin brothers of the _Comedy of Errors_, forever famous as
the Two Dromios.

And if young Hamnet told you of his sister he would tell you, doubtless,
of his grandfather who was once the bailiff or head man of Stratford
town, and who lived with them in the little house in Henley Street; and
especially would he tell you of his own dear father, Master William
Shakespeare, who wrote poems and plays, and had even acted, at the last
Christmas-time, before her Majesty the Queen in her palace at Greenwich.
For you may be sure boy Hamnet was very proud of this--thinking more of
it, no doubt, than of all the poems and plays his father had written.

Then, perhaps, you could lead the boy to tell you about himself. He
might tell you how he liked his school--if he did like it; for perhaps,
like his father's schoolboy, he did sometimes go

"with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school."

He would, however, be more interested to tell you that he went to school
in the chapel of the Holy Cross, because the old school-house next door,
to which his father had gone as a boy, was being repaired that year, and
he liked going to school in the chapel because i