It was more than a week after we were placed in our pleasant hotel in Stratford before we began to look about us in the lovely country round. The town was enough, with its openness, its brightness, its smiling kindness; for the time we could not wish for anything more, and we never found anything better, though we found abundant beauty in the farms and villages of the Midland slopes and levels. Everything in Stratford was homelike, and nothing more so than the Cochin-China Tea Rooms, where we took our luncheon, with their blaze of a small flower garden behind and the little arbor at the kitchen door where you might have a table if you liked. The coffee was very good there, for a wonder in England, and the buttered brown-bread toast was an example to the scorched and refrigerated slices of cottage-loaf prevailing elsewhere on the island; and after ordering these it was pleasant to keep along Church Street past the low-roofed and timbered almshouses to the shop where first green gages and, after their season was past, large red Victoria plums were to be had. Such a crooked little shop, with half its stock in two unrelated windows, and the rest in baskets behind and under the counter that began elbowing you our of doors as soon as you got in, and ceased treading on breathless small boys with pennies in their hands, could have been rightly served only by two such scrupulous sisters, or at the worst sisters-in-law, who would not defraud us of a single plum in the half-pound. The fruit was grown, they said, in their own orchards just out of town, but which way we never understood, and it was in no wise related to the fruit of their next-door neighbor, as he, equally with themselves, assured us. We always hurried back to the Cochin-China with it lest the toast or the coffee should be cold; but it never was, for at noonday the little tables were all full, and the service, though reliable and smiling, was not eager. We had a table in the back room looking out on the kitchen arbor, and though we were but three we kept it against all comers till one overcrowded day a young German priest came in with three nuns, and looked so hopelessly at a three-chair table that we could not do less than offer him ours, which was for four chairs. They took it with such bows and thanks as ought to have made us ashamed, but only made us proud of our simple civility, and anxious to found a claim to acquaintance on it. We did not push, though I tried hard to believe that it was my duty to tell them I knew a little of the German they were speaking, and I only eavesdropped as hard as I could till a decent chance of warning them offered. I suppose that there are sometimes gayer parties of young people, but I have seldom heard more joyous and innocent laughter than that of those gentle sisters in their angelic flirtation with that handsome young priest. He could speak English, it seemed, from his constantly saying, "All right, all right," and presently it seemed that the sisters could. All three of them were lovely and two were beautiful, and all three again were as glad as children; and none of the fashionable ladies we had left in London seemed so perfectly ladies as these dear sisters in their starched white coifs under their black veils and in their broadcloth robes falling round them in sculpturesque folds. When some offered courtesy broke what ice was left between us, the young priest was proud to tell us that the sisters were from a Catholic college in England; and he went further and said that the least young of the three was "a very learned sister." This brought us somehow to the question, always rife at Stratford, of the Baconian authorship of Shakespeare's plays, and the sister was of such a decided mind upon it that she was not surprised so much as grieved to learn that the poor lady who first mooted it had died in a lunatic asylum.

I could have wished that Shakespeare, and even Bacon, had been there to enjoy the learned sister's rejection of the theory, but I saw neither of them for some time after that day at their riverside villa. In the mean time we saw a great many fellow-Americans, not indeed at the Cochin-China Tea Rooms, where they came very sparingly, but at our hotel, where they abounded, mostly in motors with the dust of hurried travel upon them. I suppose that the motor-face, of whatever nationality, is not engaging; but when its composite expression was added to the effect of something intense and almost fierce that seems to characterize our native physiognomy abroad, one could wish that it was not always so self-evidently American in those who wore it. If the automobile conditions are everywhere such as to rob the motorist's presence of charm, to these compatriots' hardness of face was added that peculiar stoniness of voice which is so often noticeable in us, and which made them as wounding to the ear as to the eye. They overwhelmingly outnumbered the English, who lurked apart in the hotel parlor while the Americans prevailed in the hallway. It must have been difficult for the English to bear this, and I heard two of them revenging themselves one day: "It seems to me I have heard that Voice before." "Yes; that's one of the educated ones." This voice was the cat-bird twang of so many of our women, and it sometimes made itself heard in the dining-room, where the dress of the speaker was not always of that superior taste which we used to pride ourselves upon in our women. It was difficult to choose one day between the plumage of a lady who wore a single tall ostrich feather, full and blue, curling far aloof from her hat, and the feather of another lady exactly the same in outline, but as to the final curl black and skeletonized. There was in most of these motoring women an effect of not being sure that they had got all they had come for, or of not quite knowing what they had come for, and in their men a savage, suspensive air, as if, having given Europe a fair trial, as a relief from business, or as a pleasure to their wives and daughters, they were going to see about it when they got home. Perhaps all this is unfair; and perhaps it would not be just to judge our national nature from the expression of the average automobile people at home.

They had been motoring through England and Wales, as they would report when they got back, and were suffering a mental and moral dyspepsia from bolting the beautiful scenery untasted as they could seize it with distorted eyes, much as people seize the events of a three-ring circus. We ourselves became of their class for several runs into the country about, but besides not being able to afford the folly, we really preferred the neat victorias which they have cheap at Stratford, but not so cheap as good. In one of these, apt for our little party of three, we could find ourselves domesticated in the landscape round about. The country was of the same bright openness as the town, and one could as easily love it. I had supposed it leveler than it proved, though it was level enough, and where it waved, it waved with harvests of wheat and rye, golden and glossy green, rippling as the surfaces of the long ground swells at sea do. In the distance, the uplands were of a tender blue, and in the dim air the trees mounted like smoke from the hedges. The Avon and other vague streams idled about, and there were bridges and farm-houses and villages that one passed without much worrying over their identity, though no doubt they each had an identity. They had their bowering orchards of gnarled apples and of wonderful plums, green and blue and red, which were as much an example to American plums as the wheat-fields to our wheat-fields. We praised one of the thickest harvests to a conversible farmwife, but she said, "Oh no, that was not good wheat; you could see between the stems." The region is not only a good farming country, however, but a good hunting country, and after the pleasures of the Shakespeare month end in Stratford the savage joys of the chase begin for the boyish men and women who ride to hounds through the sweet, insulted scene.

In England many things change, suddenly, thoroughly, but other things remain unchanged, usages projected from the dead past like the light from planets extinct long before it has reached the earth. They still have kings and queens in that romantic island, and lords and ladies who have no more relation to its real life than gnomes and fairies, but must be indulged with the shows and games invented for them in the days when people believed in them, and not merely made-believe. Now and then a grim smile of derision which is also self-derision breaks over the good-natured visage of the make-believers and is accepted by the universal tolerance as of right and reason. Hard by a fine old stone bridge, where the Avon found us in the country half an hour after we had parted from it in town, stood a pleasant inn, with lawns and potential tea-gardens round it, which called itself The Four Alls, and illustrated its name by a sign-board bearing the effigy of the king who Rules All, of a clergyman who Prays All, of a soldier who Fights All, and of an average man who Pays Ail. These Four Alls appear to prevail in every civilized country, but they might not everywhere be painted in such smiling irony as here.

I believe it was on our way home from visiting the home of Shakespeare's mother at Wilmecote, that we stopped to converse with the amiable landlord of the Four Alls Inn. She was that Mary Arden who was as gently as his father was fiercely named, and whom one is willing to think as gently natured as her name. The Welsh are beginning to boast her of their race, as if, not content with the honor of the greatest living Briton, they must needs claim through her the greatest Briton dead; but if Welsh, she was doubtless of one of the many princely Welsh Iines, of no apparent grandeur in its exile. The Arden cottage, at any rate, is a little wayside thing, belted in with a bright-flowered narrow garden, and it leans it? timbered wall somewhat wearily, as from its weight of four hundred years, toward the earth. All the world knows, which knows so much too little of her world-famous son, that Mary Arden brought her husband this cottage and its sixty acres, under her father's will, with other lands and tenements inherited from her two sisters; and if not of princely state, she was of a comfortable yeoman lineage. When she went to live at Stratford it is pleasant to believe that she left her father and mother living at Wilmecote, and keeping up the ancestral farm there in better state than one sees it now. The cottage and the decrepit barns and stables, with their sagging walls and slanting roofs, inclose a sufficient farmyard, with a gate giving into a venerable orchard, which tempted but did not prevail with us to penetrate its grass-grown aisles. One likes to leave such places to their solitude; and besides, the tenant of the cottage, who promptly demanded sixpence each for letting us see it, was not sure that her summer lease included a sight of the orchard.

She led us up and down over the homelike cottage, which opened in an unexpected number of comfortable little rooms; these, opening casually from one to another, had been modernized, but not too modernized, with sparing English grates, where once the freer fires must have been of wood. Several staircases led to the upper rooms; the thick walls showed their oaken beams; the narrow sash were leaded; the floors were stone. It was very homelike, very suitable for a grandfather and grandmother, and I was thinking that if Shakespeare used to come out from Stratford to see the old people there he must have had glorious times, when the inaudible voice at my ear from the invisible presence at my shoulder, which I had now come to expect at any thought of it, said: "Yes, far more glorious times than any I ever had in London at the height of what I thought my prosperity. My mother used to bring me here when I was too little to know how homesick she was for it, and then sometimes my father brought me, and by and by I came alone. I dogged my grandfather's heels all over the farm till I came to know every inch of it, but I seem never to have lost any moment of my grandmother's cooking. When I went away I was in paunch and pocket full of the gingerbread which she made better than any one else in the world; I missed none of the wild berries in their season or the earlier and later apples in the orchard, or the plums that overhung the house-wall. I knew the dogs and horses and cows; I was not too proud to be friends with the pigs. I robbed the wild birds' nests, and I didn't neglect the partridges and pheasants even when I came to understand that they were sacred to the gentry; it was the beginning of my poaching, I dare say. I swam in a famous pool which there was beyond the orchard in summer, and in winter I risked a ducking on its thin ice. I loved Stratford, and my mother, and even my father, but a boy is king in his grandmother's house, and I bore sovereign rule here. Yes, those were glorious times indeed."

As we drove home to Stratford, the afternoon grew lovelier and lovelier, with a mild sun and a few large white clouds lounging in a high, blue sky. In the hedges the hips of the sweetbriers were reddening and the hawthorn berries were already scarlet. The blackberries were ripe where the canes were broken down by the pickers. The wheat was mostly cut, and in the farmyards where it had been threshed the ricks of bright new straw were neatly thatched. We came from Wilmecote to the Alcester road by a lane that was almost wild, and out through a deep, peaceful valley; when we reached the highway two little girls in pinafores were standing beside it, one with her pretty arm up to shield her eyes from the westering sun; and in all our course we met only two motors, and —

"Yes, yes! It is peaceful, peaceful, utterly charming,” I said to the presence which had mounted with us for the homeward drive, of course not incommoding us in the least; but suddenly it had become an absence, in the fashion of such presences as soon as you take your mind off them; they are so delicately fearful of seeming intrusive.