'There is a willow grows aslant a brook, That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream;' Isn't that a perfect description of this very spot? And then: 'I know a bank whereon the wild thyme blows, Where oxslips and the nodding violet grows,--' Just see the violets all about us here! There are the 'pale cowslips,' too! Do you see? Oh, it's wonderful,--wonderful to find so many of the very flowers which Shakespeare loved and talked of so much!--the daisy, the musk-rose and woodbine! There's some right by your foot, Betty. But come, come, we really must go now! We'll go back by the field above, where it is not so steep and dark. Come, John!" So they hurriedly retraced their steps toward the town. In skirting the fields on the hill-top, they once had to pick their way with some difficulty through holes in bristling hedges, and Mrs. Pitt and the girls were forced to run away from a buck, but these were little incidents to which they were all quite equal, and they arrived at the Red Horse Hotel, nothing daunted, just as the dinner-gong sounded loudly. CHAPTER TWELVE A DAY IN WARWICKSHIRE Betty did spend the evening "writing letters in Washington Irving's room at the Red Horse," as she had planned. It was in that quaint, tiny parlor that Irving wrote his well-known paper about Stratford-on-Avon, and perhaps Betty hoped to benefit by the literary atmosphere. At any rate, the letters were accomplished with great ease and rapidity, after her curiosity had been satisfied by an examination of the room. Washington Irving's armchair is there, and the old poker with which he is said to have tended the fire. On the walls hang the pictures of a number of actors and actresses who have played Shakespearean parts. Except for these, the room differs very little from the rest of the inn. About nine-thirty, the children started up to bed, Betty, enthusiastic at the prospect of a high four-poster, which "you really have to run and give a jump to get into." She and Barbara did not stay long awake to enjoy it, however, for it seemed as though their heads had hardly touched the pillows before the maid was calling them, and the bright sun was pouring in at the windows. Very early they set out to walk "across the fields to Anne." The little village of Shottery, where stands the cottage known all the world over as "Anne Hathaway's," is only about a mile distant from Stratford, and our party gayly took the path through the fields,--perhaps the very one over which Shakespeare trod when he was Anne's lover. This led them first past the "back-yards" of Stratford, then over a stile and through the green meadows, where daisies and cowslips abound. As they went along, Mrs. Pitt repeated to them the following little verse from Shakespeare's "Winter's Tale": "Jog on, jog on, the footpath way, And merrily hent the stile-a; A merry heart goes all the way, Your sad tires in a mile-a."