This is a gala day at Windsor. The Castle is decorated, and filled with royal guests. Twenty thousand people are assembled in the park. At two o’clock the Queen and her visitors form a procession at the Palace, and pass slowly down the avenue between the two rows of elm-trees. Reaching the far end of the boulevard, they turn to the left and, after driving one mile more, they arrive at the place that is to be the scene of action. The two thousand persons who preceded the royal procession have formed a circle about a hundred feet in diameter. The size of the circle is determined by a rope stretched around. The open space is spread with a rich carpet. The Queen, attended by her family and royal friends, enters the charmed circle and proceeds to its centre. After a speech, which it takes her fifteen minutes to deliver, she proceeds to lay the cornerstone of an equestrian monument to the late Prince Albert Consort. This impressive ceremony being over, the Queen approaches the crowd, shakes hands with and speaks kindly to those persons standing next to the rope on the outside. I could shake hands with Her Majesty, and would do so, but my American spirit is too proud to bend the suppliant knee to any earthly monarch. I honor Victoria for her useful life and deep piety, for her wifely devotion and maternal instincts; and I would take off my hat to her as I would have her son take off his hat to my mother. But as for bowing the knee to her, I never can. My knees are too stiff for that kind of exercise. [Illustration: Anne Hathaway’s Cottage. Charlecote Church. Charlecote Park Palings. Shakespeare’s House Interior. Shakespeare’s House Exterior. Stratford Church. Entrance to Stratford Church. Porch Charlecote. ] Two hours after leaving Windsor, I find myself in Stratford-on-Avon, the home of our own “priceless Shakespeare.” I spend the night here. “A sweet English village is this Stratford, seated on the edge of a silvery river green with turfy banks and woody slopes, picturesque with cottage houses and cottage gardens; crowned with a village church, ivy-clad, surrounded by moss-grown graves, approached by a lime-tree avenue, and its slender spire tapering towards Heaven.” Here Shakespeare first saw light. Here his boyhood was spent, his education received, his youth passed, his marriage consummated. Here his children were born and brought up. Here, too, he yielded to that “bribeless harvester”—Death. So this humble village has given to the world “the greatest name in our literature, in all literature.” Hence, Henry Bell said: “His birthplace came to be famous, And the grave where his bones were laid; And to Stratford, the ancient borough, Nations their pilgrimage made.”