Before the Forest of Arden was cut away for the use of the Droitwich salt-boilers and other Vandals, the land was so thickly wooded that tradition says a squirrel might have skipped from bough to bough across the county, without once touching the ground. Now it is rich glebe and tillage. We skirted the broad acres of Charlecote Park and viewed its "native burghers," the deer, but were loth to believe that Shakespeare, even in his heyday of youthful riot, would have "let the law go whistle" for the sake of "a hot venison-pasty to dinner." Yet it is like enough that there was no love lost between the Shakespeares and the Lucys, a family who have held the manor since the twelfth century and, in their Elizabethan representative, laid themselves open to the suspicion of pompous bearing and deficient sense of humour. The _luces_, or pikes, in their coat of arms, the pun-loving tongue of a "most acute juvenal" could hardly have resisted. "The dozen white louses do become an old coat well." Sir Thomas Lucy entertained Queen Elizabeth in 1572, and if the boys from Stratford Grammar School were not in evidence at the Park Gates on her arrival, it must have been because Holofernes was drilling them for a show of the Nine Worthies later on. In the fields about the town the pea-pickers, an autumn feature of this neighbourhood, were already at work. They held our eyes for a little and, when we looked forward again, there by the river rose the spire of Holy Trinity, keeping its faithful watch and ward. We clattered over the old stone bridge of fourteen arches and there we were, between the staring rows of tourist shops, all dealing in Shakespeare commercialised. His likeness, his name, his plays are pressed into every huckster's service. The windows fairly bristle with busts of Shakespeare of all sizes and half a dozen colours; with models of the Henley Street house, ranging in price, with varying magnitude and material, from pennies to pounds; with editions of his works, from miniature copies to colossal; with photographs, postal-cards, etchings, sketches; with rubbings of his tombstone inscription; with birthday books and wall texts, and with all sorts of articles, paper-cutters, match-boxes, pencil-trays, I dare say bootjacks, stamped with verse or phrase of his. This poet-barter is only a fraction of Shakespeare's endowment of his native town. Innkeepers, porters, drivers, guides, custodians are maintained by him. Sir Thomas Lucy never dreamed of such a retinue. Hardly did Warwick the King-maker support so great a household. He is not only Stratford's pride, but its prosperity, and the welfare of the descendants of Shakespeare's neighbours is not a matter for the stranger to deplore. Nevertheless, we hunted up lodgings, drank bad tea at one of the Shakespeare Tea Rooms, and were out of those greedy streets as quickly as possible on a stroll across the old ridged fields to Shottery. [Illustration: CHARLECOTE PARK ENTRANCE]