Wherever in Stratford you come upon anything associated, even remotely, with the name and fame of Shakespeare, there you will find the gracious tokens of American homage. The libraries of the Birthplace and of the Memorial alike contain gifts of American books. New Place and Anne Hathaway's cottage are never omitted from the American traveller's round of visitations and duty of practical tribute. The Falcon, with its store of relics; the romantic Shakespeare Hotel, with its rambling passages, its quaint rooms named after Shakespeare's characters, its antique bar parlour, and the rich collection of autographs and pictures that has been made by Mrs. Justins; the Grammar School, in which no doubt the poet, "with shining morning face" of boyhood, was once a pupil; John Marshall's antiquarian workshop, from which so many of the best souvenirs of Stratford have proceeded,--a warm remembrance of his own quaintness, kindness, and originality being perhaps the most precious of them; the Town Hall, adorned with Gainsborough's eloquent portrait of Garrick, to which no engraving does justice; the Guild chapel; the Clopton bridge; Lucy's mill; the footpath across fields and roads to Shottery, bosomed in great elms; and the ancient picturesque building, four miles away, at Wilmcote, which was the home of Mary Arden, Shakespeare's mother,--each and every one of those storied places receives, in turn, the tribute of the wandering American, and each repays him a hundredfold in charming suggestiveness of association, in high thought, and in the lasting impulse of sweet and soothing poetic reverie. At the Red Horse, where Mr. William Gardner Colbourne maintains the traditions of old-fashioned English hospitality, he finds his home; well pleased to muse and dream in Washington Irving's parlour, while the night deepens and the clock in the distant tower murmurs drowsily in its sleep. Those who will may mock at his enthusiasm. He would not feel it but for the spell that Shakespeare's genius has cast upon the world. He ought to be glad and grateful that he can feel that spell; and, since he does feel it, nothing could be more natural than his desire to signify that he too, though born far away from the old home of his race, and separated from it by three thousand miles of stormy ocean, has still his part in the divine legacy of Shakespeare, the treasure and the glory of the English tongue. [Illustration: _Henry Irving. 1888._]