Leamington was close at hand, with its Royal Pump Rooms, swimming-baths and gardens, its villas and crescents and bath-chairs and parades, its roll of illustrious invalids who have drunk of its mineral waters; but we would not turn aside for Leamington. Dr. Parr's church at Hatton could not detain us, nor other churches and mansions of renown, nor the footsteps of the worthies of the Gunpowder Plot, nor Edge Hill where Charles I met the Parliamentarians in the first battle of the Civil War, nor the park of Redway Grange in which Fielding wrote--and laughed as he wrote--a portion of "Tom Jones," nor the Red Horse cut in turf, nor any other of the many attractions of a neighbourhood so crowded with memorials of stirring life. Our thoughts were all of Shakespeare now; our goal was Stratford-on-Avon. Should we drive by the right bank of the river, or the left? The choice lay between Snitterfield and Charlecote Park. In Snitterfield, a village four miles to the north of Stratford, the poet's paternal grandsire, Richard Shakespeare, wore out a quiet yeoman life, tilling the farm that he rented from Robert Arden of Wilmcote, father of the poet's mother. There must have been a strain of something better than audacity in the tenant's son to win him the hand of Mary Arden. Henry Shakespeare, the poet's uncle, died at Snitterfield in 1596, when the quick scion of that slow blood was in the first fever of his London successes. But we chose the left-hand road and Charlecote Park. For a while the sunny Avon, silver-flecked with such swans as Shakespeare and Ben Jonson may have smiled upon together, bore us blithe company; then we passed under the shadow of oaks with "antique root" out-peeping, and of more "moss'd trees That have outliv'd the eagle."