t gave him more
holidays.

Ah, he would tell you, he did enjoy those holidays. For the little house
in Henley Street was a bit crowded, and he liked to be out of doors,
being, I suspect, rather a boy of the woods and the fields than of the
Horn-Book, the Queen's Grammar, and Cato's Maxims. He and Judith had
jolly times abroad, for Judith was a good comrade, and really had it
easier than he did--so he would tell you--for Judith never went to
school. In fact, to her dying day, Judith Shakespeare--think of that,
you Shakespeare scholars!--a daughter of the greatest man in English
literature could neither read nor write!

So the Shakespeare twins would roam the fields, and knew, blindfold, all
that bright country-side about beautiful Stratford. Their father was a
great lover of nature. You know that from reading his plays, and his
twins took after him in this. Young Hamnet Shakespeare loved to hang
over Clopton Bridge, as we found him to-day, watching the rippling Avon
as it wound through the Stratford meadows and past the little town. He
knew all the turns and twists of that storied river with which his great
father's name is now so closely linked. He knew where to find and how to
catch the perch and pike that swam beneath its surface. He and Judith
had punted on it above and below Clopton Bridge, and on many a warm
summer day he had stripped for a swim in its cooling water.

He knew Stratford from the Guild Pits to the Worcester road, and from
the Salmon Tail to the Cross-on-the-Hill. He could tell you how big a
jump it was across the streamlet in front of the Rother Market, and how
much higher the roof of the Bell was than of the Wool-Shop, next
door--for he had climbed them both.

He knew where, in Stratford meadows, the violets grew thickest and
bluest in the spring, where the tall cowslips fairly "smothered" the
fields, as the boys and girls of Stratford affirmed, and where, in the
wood by the weir-brakes just below the town the fairies sometimes came
from the Long Compton quarries to dance and sing on a midsummer night.

He had time and time again wandered along the Avon from Luddington to
Charlecote. He had been many a time to his mother's home cottage at
Shottery, and to his grandfather's orchards at Snitterfield for
leather-coats and wardens. He knew how to snare rabbits and "conies" in
Ilmington woods, and he had learned how to tell, by their horns, the age
of the deer in Charlecote Park--descendants, perhap