There is a new custodian at New Place, and he will show you the little museum that is kept there--including the shovel-board from the old Falcon tavern across the way, on which the poet himself might have played--and he will lead you through the gardens, and descant on the mulberry and on the ancient and still unforgiven vandalism of the Rev. Francis Gastrell, by whom the Shakespeare mansion was destroyed (1759), and will pause at the well, and at the fragments of the foundation, covered now with stout screens of wire. There is a fresh and fragrant beauty all about these grounds, an atmosphere of sunshine, life, comfort and elegance of state, that no observer can miss. This same keeper also has the keys of the guild chapel, opposite, on which Shakespeare looked from his windows and his garden, and in which he was the holder of two sittings. You will enter it by the same porch through which he walked, and see the arch and columns and tall, mullioned windows on which his gaze has often rested. The interior is cold and barren now, for the scriptural wall-paintings, discovered there in 1804, under a thick coating of whitewash, have been obliterated and the wooden pews, which are modern, have not yet been embrowned by age. Yet this church, known beyond question as one of Shakespeare's personal haunts, will hold you with the strongest tie of reverence and sympathy. At his birthplace everything remains unchanged. The gentle ladies who have so long guarded and shown it still have it in their affectionate care. The ceiling of the room in which the poet was born--the room that contains "the Actor's Pillar" and the thousands of signatures on walls and windows--is slowly crumbling to pieces. Every morning little particles of the plaster are found upon the floor. The area of tiny, delicate iron laths, to sustain this ceiling, has more than doubled (1882) since I first saw it, in 1877. It was on the ceiling that Lord Byron wrote his name, but this has flaked off and disappeared. In the museum hall, once the Swan inn, they are forming a library; and there you may see at least one Shakespearean relic of extraordinary interest. This is the MS. letter of Richard Quiney--whose son Thomas became, in 1616, the husband of Shakespeare's youngest daughter, Judith--asking the poet for the loan of thirty pounds. It is enclosed between plates of glass in a frame, and usually kept covered with a cloth, so that the sunlight may not fade the ink. The date of this letter is October 25, 1598, and thirty English pounds then was a sum equivalent to about six hundred dollars of American money now. This is the only letter known to be in existence that Shakespeare received. Miss Caroline Chataway, the younger of the ladies who keep this house, will recite to you its text, from memory--giving a delicious old-fashioned flavour to its quaint phraseology and fervent spirit, as rich and strange as the odour of the wild thyme and rosemary that grow in her garden beds.