Broadway, for instance, is on the old post road that runs from London, through Oxford, on to Worcester and the west; within easy reach of Stratford and Kenilworth; its nearest station, Evesham, an old market town where Simon de Montfort, who first stood up for Englishmen against the Norman conquerors and for the rights of the common people, was slain in battle. As you near the village the pleasant vale of Evesham narrows into a horseshoe of hills, gentle slopes of verdure intersected with hedges, and rimmed with coppices and woods. Millet’s house is at the entrance; a little farther on, the village green; and a little farther still a fine old gabled inn, where Cromwell, says the story, slept after his victory at Worcester. The broad street, continually mounting, passes between gabled farmhouses, buried in ivy, and cottages whose windows are bright with pot geraniums and little gardens filled with the flowers and herbs that Ophelia crooned of; past doorways that bear the date of that first James, “the most learned fool in Christendom”; past the remantled farmstead where Mary Anderson in her present _rôle_ of wife and mother would fain forget that she has been a star; till it winds up in a thin line of white between the green and [Illustration: Copyright, 1902, by Carnegie Institute. THE PENANCE OF ELEANOR, DUCHESS OF GLOUCESTER. BY EDWIN A. ABBEY.] [Illustration: From the collection of Whitelaw Reid, Esq. Copyright, 1902, by Whitelaw Reid. PAVANE. BY EDWIN A. ABBEY. (Painted in 1895 to occupy a special place in the room where it now is.)] brown, and vanishes at the top of the hill, where beyond the mounds and hollows of a Roman encampment there is only the knowledge of a modern world. But you have scarce seen Broadway until you have penetrated into some of the cottage and kitchen interiors, with their wide-open hearths, smoke-stained timbered ceilings, from which hang hams and flitches of bacon and strings of onions; or passed to the backs of some of the houses and explored the dairies and quaint inglenooks of architecture, the trim vegetable gardens, the apple orchards and the barnyards, in close companionship with which is always the vivid green of the pleasant hills.