Goldie was a bright yellow collie, intensely vivacious, sharp-nosed, brown-eyed; a dog that knew not what it was to be quiet; a dog you might lose at the other end of the county, confident that he would scamper home across wood and hill and valley as straight as the crow’s flight. He spent half his life tied up in the stable-yard, and the other half rushing about the country with Daphne. He travelled an incalculable number of miles in the course of an ordinary walk, and was given to racing cattle. He worshipped Daphne, and held her in some awe on this cattle question; would leap into the air with mad delight when she was kind to him, or grovel at her feet when she was angry. ‘Now, Goldie dear, if you and I are to lunch in Charlecote Park, I must take a strap for you,’ said Daphne, as they started from the stable-yard, Goldie proclaiming his rapture by clamorous barking. ‘It will never do for you to go racing the Lucy deer, or even the Lucy oxen. We should get into worse trouble than Shakespeare did, for Shakespeare had not such a frigid father as mine. I daresay old John, the glover, was an easy-going indulgent soul whom his son could treat anyhow.’ It was only a walk of two miles across the fields to Charlecote; two miles by meadows that are as lovely and as richly timbered as they could have been in Shakespeare’s time. High farming is not yet the rule in Warwickshire. Hedges grow high and wild; broad oaks spread their kingly branches above the rich rank grass; dock and mallow, foxglove, fern, and dog-rose thrive and bloom beside every ditch; and many a fair stretch of grass by the roadside—a no man’s land of pleasant pasture—offers space for the hawker’s van, or the children’s noonday sports, or the repose of the tired tramp, lying face downwards in a rapture of rest, while the skylark trills in the distant blue above him, and the rustle of summer leaves soothes his slumber. It is a lovely country, lovely in its simple, pastoral, English beauty, calm and fitting cradle for a great mind. After the fields came a lane, a green arcade with a leafy roof, through which the sun-rays crept in quivering lines of light, and then the gate that opened on the footpath across Charlecote Park. Yonder showed the gray walls of the house, venerable on one side, modern on the other, and the stone single-arched bridge, and the lake, narrowing to a dull sluggish-looking stream that seemed to flow nowhere in particular. The tallest and stoutest of the elms looked too young for Shakespeare’s time. But here and there appeared the ruin of a tree, hollow of trunk, gaunt of limb, whose green branches may once have sheltered the deer he stole.