In shape the town of Stratford somewhat resembles a large cross, which is formed by High Street, running nearly north and south, and Bridge Street and Wood Street, running nearly east and west. From these, which are main avenues, radiate many and devious branches. A few of the streets are broad and straight but many of them are narrow and crooked. High and Bridge streets intersect each other at the centre of the town, and there stands the market house, an ugly building, of the period of George the Fourth, with belfry and illuminated clock, facing eastward toward the old stone bridge, with fourteen arches,--the bridge that Sir Hugh Clopton built across the Avon, in the reign of Henry the Seventh. A cross once stood at the corner of High Street and Wood Street, and near the cross was a pump and a well. From that central point a few steps will bring the traveller to the birthplace of Shakespeare. Illustration: "Shakespeare's Birthplace in Henley Street." It is a little, two-story cottage, of timber and plaster, on the north side of Henley Street, in the western part of the town. It must have been, in its pristine days, finer than most of the dwellings in its neighbourhood. The one-story house, with attic windows, was the almost invariable fashion of building, in English country towns, till the seventeenth century. This cottage, besides its two stories, had dormer-windows, a pent-house over its door, and altogether was built and appointed in a manner both luxurious and substantial. Its age is unknown; but the history of Stratford reaches back to a period three hundred years antecedent to William the Conqueror, and fancy, therefore, is allowed ample room to magnify its antiquity. It was bought, or occupied, by Shakespeare's father in 1555, and in it he resided till his death, in 1601, when it descended by inheritance to the poet. Such is the substance of the complex documentary evidence and of the emphatic tradition that consecrate this cottage as the house in which Shakespeare was born. The point has never been absolutely settled. John Shakespeare, the father, was the owner in 1564 not only of the house in Henley Street but of another in Greenhill Street. William Shakespeare might have been born at either of those dwellings. Tradition, however, has sanctified the Henley Street cottage; and this, accordingly, as Shakespeare's cradle, will be piously guarded to a late posterity.