The supposed birthplace is now converted, after a chequered career, into a Shakespeare Museum, where are treasured more or less authentic relics and those first editions which are worth their weight in radium. Built of the tough Arden oak and of honest plaster, it was a respectable residence for the times, not unworthy of that versatile and vigorous citizen who traded in corn and timber and wool and cattle, rose from the offices of ale-taster and constable to be successively Chamberlain, Alderman, and High Bailiff, and loomed before the eyes of his little son as the greatest man in the world. The house, whose clay floors it may have been the children's task to keep freshly strewn with rushes, would have been furnished with oaken chests and settles, stools, trestle-boards, truckle-beds, and perhaps a great bedstead with carved posts. Robert Arden, a man of property and position, had left, among other domestic luxuries, eleven "painted cloths"--naïve representations of religious or classical subjects, with explanatory texts beneath. His daughter may have had some of these works of art to adorn the walls of her Stratford home, and, like enough, she brought her husband a silver salt-cellar and a "fair garnish of pewter." Her eldest son, whose plays "teach courtesy to kings," was doubtless carefully bred,--sent off early to school "with shining morning face," and expected to wait on his parents at their eleven o'clock breakfast before taking his own, though we need feel no concern about his going hungry. Trust him for knowing, as he passed the trenchers and filled the flagons, how to get many a staying nibble behind his father's back.