Jock and Mhor were in the highest spirits. It seemed to them enormous fun to be staying in a hotel, and not an ordinary square up-and-down hotel, but a rambling place with little stairs in unexpected places, and old parts and new parts, and bedrooms owning names, and a long, low-roofed drawing-room with a window at the far end that opened right out to the stable-yard through which pleasantries could be exchanged with grooms and chauffeurs. There was a parlour, too, off the hall--the cosiest of parlours with cream walls and black oak beams and supports, two fireplaces round which were grouped inviting arm-chairs, tables with books and papers, many bowls of daffodils. And all over the house hung old prints of scenes in the plays; glorious pictures, some of them--ghosts and murders over which Mhor gloated. They went before luncheon to the river and sailed up and down in a small steam-launch named _The Swan of Avon_. Jean thought privately that the presence of such things as steam-launches were a blot on Shakespeare's river, but the boys were delighted with them, and at once began to plan how one might be got to adorn Tweed. In the afternoon they walked over the fields to Shottery to see Anne Hathaway's cottage. Jean walked in a dream. On just such an April day, when shepherds pipe on oaten straws, Shakespeare himself must have walked here. It would be different, of course; there would be no streets of little mean houses, only a few thatched cottages. But the larks would be singing as they were to-day, and the hawthorn coming out, and the spring flowers abloom in Anne Hathaway's garden. She caught her breath as they went out of the sunshine into the dim interior of the cottage. This ingle-nook ... Shakespeare must have sat here on winter evenings and talked. Did he tell Anne Hathaway wonderful tales? Perhaps, when he was not writing and weaving for himself a garment of immortality, he was just an everyday man, genial with his neighbours, interested in all the small events of his own town, just Master Shakespeare whom the children looked up from their play to smile at as he passed. "Oh, Jock," Jean said, clutching her brother's sleeve. "Can you really believe that _he_ sat here?--actually in this little room? Looked out of the window--isn't it _wonderful_, Jock?" Jock, like Mr. Fearing, ever wakeful on the enchanted ground, rolled his head uncomfortably, sniffed, and said, "It smells musty!" Both he and Mhor were frankly much more interested in the fact that ginger-beer and biscuits were to be had in the cottage next door.