We wandered on to the Grammar School, still located in the picturesque, half-timbered building originally erected, toward the end of the thirteenth century, by the Guild of the Holy Cross. Here once was hospital as well as school, and in the long hall on the ground floor, even yet faintly frescoed with the Crucifixion, the Guild held its meetings and kept its feasts. Henry VIII made but half a bite of all this, but the boy-king, Edward VI, eleven years before Shakespeare's birth, gave the ancient edifice back to Stratford. Then the long hall was used for the deliberations of the Town Council, and sometimes, especially when John Shakespeare was in office, for the performances of strolling players,--three men and a boy, perhaps, travelling in their costumes, which, by a little shifting and furbishing, might serve for an old-fashioned morality or a new-fangled chronicle, or, should the schoolmaster's choice prevail, for something newly Englished from the classics. "Seneca cannot be too heavy, nor Plautus too light." The school, thenceforth known as Edward VI Grammar School, was permanently established in the top story, where it is still in active operation. Here we saw the Latin room in which another William than Mistress Page's hopeful was taught "to hick and to hack," and the Mathematics room where he learned enough arithmetic to "buy spices for our sheep-shearing." He was only fourteen or fifteen, it is believed, when his father's business troubles broke off his schooling, but not his education. Everywhere was "matter for a hot brain." And he, who, since the days when he "plucked geese, played truant, and whipped top, ... knew not what 'twas to be beaten," would have borne up blithely against this seeming set-back. Nature had given him "wit to flout at Fortune," and these, too, were the red-blooded years of youth, when he was ever ready to "dance after a tabor and pipe" and pay his laughing court to many a "queen of curds and cream." "But, O, the thorns we stand upon!" The mature charms of Anne Hathaway turned jest into earnest and sent prudence down the wind. There was a hasty wedding, nobody knows where, and John Shakespeare's burdens were presently increased by the advent of three grandchildren. It was obviously high time for this ne'er-do-well young John-a-Dreams--"yet he's gentle; never schooled, and yet learned; full of noble device; of all sorts enchantingly beloved"--to strike out into the world and seek his fortune.