Loitering in Pleasant Paths. Marion Harland

      WE had “Queen’s weather” for most of our excursions in England, and no fairer day than that on which we went to Stratford-on-Avon.

      The denizens of the region give the first sound of a to the name of the quiet river—as in fate. I do not undertake to decide whether they, or we are correct. Their derelictions upon the H question are so flagrant as to breed distrust of all their inventions and practice in pronunciation. (Although we did learn to say “Tems”—very short—for “T’ames.”)

      I wish, for the benefit of future tourists who may read these pages, that I had retained the address of the driver—and I believe the owner—of the waggonette we secured for our drives in Warwickshire. It held our party of six comfortably, leaving abundant space in the bottom and under the seats for hamper and wraps, and was a stylish, easy-running vehicle. The coachman was a fine young fellow of, perhaps, six-and-twenty, civil, obliging, and, in our experience, an exceptionally intelligent member of his class. In this conveyance, and with such pilotage, we set out on July 27th, upon one of our red-letter pilgrimages—fore-ordained within our, for once, prophetic souls ever since, as ten-year old children, we used to read Shakspeare secretly in the garret on rainy Saturdays.

      It was an old copy relegated to the lumber-chest as too shabby for the family library. One side of the calf-skin cover was gone, and luckily for the morals of the juvenile student, “Venus and Adonis” and most of the sonnets had followed suite. But an engraved head of William Shakspeare was protected by the remaining cover and had left a shadow-picture, in white-and-yellow, upon the tissue-paper next it. After the title-page followed a dozen or so of biography, which we devoured as eagerly as we did “The Tempest,” “Julius Cæsar,” and “Macbeth.” We had read Mrs. Whitney’s always-and-everywhere charming “Sights and Insights,” before and since leaving America, and worn Emory Ann’s “realizing our geography” to shreds by much quoting. To-day, we were realizing our Shakspeare and “Merry” England.

      The drive was surpassingly lovely. The smoothness of the road was, in itself, a luxury. It is as evenly-graded and free from stones and ruts as a bowling-alley. One prolific topic of conversation is denied the morning-callers and bashful swains of Warwickshire. They cannot discuss the “state of the roads,” their uniform condition being above criticism. The grass grew quite up to the edge of the highway, but was shaven and weedless as a lawn. There were hedge-rows instead of fences, and at intervals, we had enchanting glimpses up intersecting ways of what we had heard and read of all our lives, yet in which we scarcely believed until we saw, in their beauty and picturesqueness, real lanes. The banks, sloping downward from the hedges into these, were clothed with vines, ferns and field-flowers. One appreciates the exquisite fidelity of such sketches from Nature as—

      “I know a bank on which the wild thyme blows,

      Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows

      Quite over-canopied with lush woodbine

      With sweet musk-roses and with eglantine—”

      after seeing the lanes between Leamington and Stratford-on-Avon. Double rows of noble trees screened us from the sun for a mile at a time, and the hedges, so skillfully clipped that the sides and rounded tops were never marred by redundant growth, yet bearing no sign of the shears in stubby or naked stems, were walls of richest verdure throughout the route. The freshness and trimness of the English landscape is a joy and wonder forever to those unused to the perfection of agriculture which is the growth of centuries. There is the finish and luxuriance of a pleasure-garden in every prospect in these midland counties, and, forgetting that the soil has acknowledged a master in the husbandman for more than a thousand years, and that, for more than half that time, the highest civilization known to man has held reign in this tiny island, we are tempted to think discontentedly of the contrast offered by our own magnificent, and, by contrast, crude spaces. It was not because of affectation or lack of patriotism that, upon our return home, the straggling fences, clogged with alder and brambles, the ragged pastures and gullied hillsides were a positive pain to sight and heart.

      Any one who has seen a good photograph of Shakspeare’s house knows exactly how it looks. The black timbers of the frame-work are visible from the outside. The spaces between the beams are filled with cement or plaster. There are three gables in front, the third, at the upper corner, broader and higher than the others. The chimney is in the end-gable, joining this last at right angles, and is covered with ivy. A pent-house protects the main entrance. Wide latticed windows light the ground-floor; a latticed oriel projects from the second story of the taller division of the building. Smaller casements in line with this are set in each of the principal upper rooms. The house is flush with the street, and is probably smarter in its “restoration,” than when Master John Shakspeare, wool-dealer, lived here. We entered, without intervening vestibule or passage, a square room, the ceiling of which was not eight feet high. A peasant’s kitchen, that was also best-room, with a broken stone floor and plastered walls checquered by hewn beams.

      Two sisters, who dressed, looked, moved and spoke absurdly alike, are the custodians of the cottage. One met us with a professional droop of a not-elastic figure, a mechanical smile and an immediate plunge into business:

      “After the removal of the Shakspeare family from this humble tenement, it was leased to a prosperous butcher, who occupied this room as a shop. That was, indeed, a sad desecration, and one that accounts for the dilapidation of the floor, it having been shattered by chopping meat upon it.”

      No reasonable visitor could desire to linger in the apartment longer than sufficed for the delivery of the comprehensive formula, and she tiptoed into the adjoining room:

      “In this the family were accustomed to sit when they were not dressed in their best clothes”—mincingly jocular.

      Caput and I, regardless of routine, strayed back into the outer kitchen to get a more satisfactory look, and after our fashion, and that of Mr. Swiveller’s Marchioness, “to make-believe very hard.” We wanted to shut our eyes—and