rn tiles, their
ingle nooks, their dormer windows, their oak rafters and their many
gables, tell of a time when the jerry-builder was not and the suburban
villa had not yet come into being. It was an age of beauty, and the
walks round Stratford remain beautiful to this hour, despite the growth
of villadom and the advent of the railway line.

We can follow the roads that Shakespeare knew, to the woods of his
poaching exploits, and the meadows over which he passed to thatched,
half-timbered Shottery, where the village inn was still standing when
men, now middle-aged, were born. Rustic gardens, white-blossomed
orchards, tiny brooks beloved by the kingfisher, trees that may have
seen the courting of the poet and his wife, still remain to tell the
story of England's unchanging charm. In the spring and early summer
there is such an atmosphere about the countryside as George Meredith has
created in his "Richard Feverel" when Richard and Lucy meet in "the very
spring-tide of their youth." Doubtless there are other regions in
plenty, scattered through the length and breadth of our fascinating
English country, wherein the attractions are hardly less than here; but
Shakespeare's genius has hallowed Stratford for us, because that
particular countryside made him a poet and sent him to London, full of
such inspiration as has not fallen to any other Englishman even in times
when the literary activity of the age has been at its highest point.

=MARY ARDEN'S COTTAGE=

It may be suggested in passing that much of the early romance associated
with Anne Hathaway's cottage is spurious, and the worthy people who tell
of the poet's courtship there overlook the fact that his relations with
his wife were clandestine and his marriage almost a secret union. But
the cottage itself is beautiful enough to account for the enthusiastic
departure from the path of truth, if not to justify it.

Lying on the left as you come out of Stratford to Shottery, past the
post-office, to the "Bell Inn," where the road has crossed a stream, we
see the cottage, and, _horribile dictu!_ a row of modern brick-built
cottages for background! Long, thatched and creeper-covered, built upon
slabs of stone, with timber and plaster above, with tiny windows under
the thatch, surrounded by a well-filled and carefully tended garden, the
place makes a quick and enduring appeal to the imagination, even though
the legends associated with it are, for the most part, legends and