This antique touch adds a wonderful charm to the relics of the past. I found it once more when sitting in the chimney-corner of Anne Hathaway's kitchen; and again in the lovely little church at Charlecote, where a simple, kindly woman, not ashamed to reverence the place and the dead, stood with me at the tomb of the Lucys, and repeated from memory the tender, sincere, and eloquent epitaph with which Sir Thomas Lucy thereon commemorates his wife. The lettering is small and indistinct on the tomb, but having often read it I well knew how correctly it was then spoken. Nor shall I ever read it again without thinking of that kindly, pleasant voice, the hush of the beautiful church, the afternoon sunlight streaming through the oriel window, and--visible through the doorway arch--the roses waving among the churchyard graves. In the days of Shakespeare's courtship, when he strolled across the fields to Anne Hathaway's cottage at Shottery, his path, we may be sure, ran through wild pasture-land and tangled thicket. A fourth part of England at that time was a wilderness, and the entire population of that country did not exceed five millions of persons. The Stratford-upon-Avon of to-day is still possessed of some of its ancient features; but the region round about it then must have been rude and wild in comparison with what it is at present. If you walk in the foot-path to Shottery now you will pass between low fences and along the margin of gardens,--now in the sunshine, and now in the shadow of larch and chestnut and elm, while the sweet air blows upon your face and the expeditious rook makes rapid wing to the woodland, cawing as he flies. In the old cottage, with its roof of thatch, its crooked rafters, its odorous hedges and climbing vines, its leafy well and its tangled garden, everything remains the same. Mrs. Mary Taylor Baker, the last living descendant of the Hathaways, born in this house, always a resident here, and now an elderly woman, still has it in her keeping, and still displays to you the ancient carved bedstead in the garret, the wooden settle by the kitchen fireside, the hearth at which Shakespeare sat, the great blackened chimney with its adroit iron "fish-back" for the better regulation of the tea-kettle, and the brown and tattered Bible, with the Hathaway family record. Sitting in an old arm-chair, in the corner of Anne Hathaway's bedroom, I could hear, in the perfumed summer stillness, the low twittering of birds, whose nest is in the covering thatch and whose songs would awaken the sleeper at the earliest light of dawn. A better idea can be obtained in this cottage than in either the birthplace or any other Shakespearean haunt of what the real life actually was of the common people of England in Shakespeare's day. The stone floor and oak timbers of the Hathaway kitchen, stained and darkened in the slow decay of three hundred years, have lost no particle of their pristine character. The occupant of the cottage has not been