The town of Stratford-upon-Avon seemed not to be conscious of the great truth which the Easy Chair is expounding when it seemed disposed to let the house of Shakespeare be sold, and even moved away. But England at least was wiser, and the house remains. Some day--and the Easy Chair dedicates the remark as a conciliatory conclusion to the _Bugle of Freedom_--some day the Bugles of that same honored name will gaze at the present printing-office, where a sympathetic Easy Chair trusts the jobs are many and profitable, and will say, with emotion, "There the parental _Bugle of Freedom_ blew its melodious note." It will do the Buglets no harm, as they return to their palatial mansions, to reflect upon the simple and sturdy origin of their prosperity. The Easy Chair has the more feeling upon this subject because directly opposite to the vast and many-windowed building from which it surveys the world stands the old Walton House. Eighty years ago it was one of the finest houses in town. The Square, where now business hums and roars, then softly murmured with fashion, and this was the Faubourg St. Honoré of the republican city. The house still has the stately air of the old régime. The stone pediment of the windows is elaborate and arrests the idle eye. But it is now a sailors' boarding-house. The walls are cracked, and the house has an indescribable aspect of shabbiness and neglect. Surrounded by the mere mob of three-storied modern brick buildings, it has evidently become reckless and lost to shame, like a king's heir fallen into debauched and degraded courses. Long since slighted and forgotten, its peers utterly gone, their descendants moved miles away, and become a modern generation about the reservoir on Murray Hill, the Easy Chair has yet more than once, late on a summer afternoon, when trade had gone up-town, and silence and dreams were setting in, beheld the old Walton House glancing covertly across the street at our modern, many-windowed, bustling palace of busy traffic with a look of high-born haughtiness and contempt. "There may be trade going on within my walls," it seems to say as it gazes, "but I am innocent of it. I was not built for trade, at least." And then the Easy Chair, with its own eyes fixed upon the cracked and leaning walls, seems to see it reeling away into its dingy obscurity.