sanctioned by his children; the portrait was sanctioned by his friend Ben Jonson, and by his brother actors Heminge and Condell, who prefixed it, in 1623, to the first folio of his works. Standing among the relics that have been gathered into a museum in an apartment on the ground-floor of the cottage it was essential also to remember how often "the wish is father to the thought" that sanctifies the uncertain memorials of the distant past. Several of the most suggestive documents, though, which bear upon the sparse and shadowy record of Shakespeare's life are preserved in this place. Here is a deed, made in 1596, which proves that this house was his father's residence. Here is the only letter addressed to him that is known to exist--the letter of Richard Quiney (1598) asking for the loan of thirty pounds. Here is a declaration in a suit, in 1604, to recover the price of some malt that he had sold to Philip Rogers. Here is a deed, dated 1609, on which is the autograph of his brother Gilbert, who represented him, at Stratford, in his business affairs, while he was absent in London, and who, surviving, it is dubiously said, almost till the period of the Restoration, talked, as a very old man, of the poet's impersonation of Adam in _As You Like It._ (Possibly the reference of that legend is not to Gilbert but to a son of his. Gilbert would have been nearly a century old when Charles the Second came to the throne.) Here likewise is shown a gold seal ring, found many years ago in a field near Stratford church, on which, delicately engraved, appear the letters W. S., entwined with a true lovers' knot. It may have belonged to Shakespeare. The conjecture is that it did, and that,--since on the last of the three sheets which contain his will the word "seal" is stricken out and the word "hand" substituted,--he did not seal that document because he had only just then lost this ring. The supposition is, at least, ingenious. It will not harm the visitor to accept it. Nor, as he stands poring over the ancient, decrepit school-desk which has been lodged in this museum, from the grammar-school, will it greatly tax his credulity to believe that the "shining morning face" of the boy Shakespeare once looked down upon it, in the irksome quest of his "small Latin and less Greek." They call it Shakespeare's desk. It is old, and it is known to have been in the school of the guild three hundred years ago. There are other relics, more or less indirectly connected with the great name that is here commemorated. The inspection of them all would consume many days; the description of them would occupy many pages. You write your name in the visitors' book at parting, and perhaps stroll forth into the garden of the cottage, which encloses it at the sides and in the rear, and there, beneath the leafy boughs of the English lime, while your footsteps press "the grassy carpet of this plain," behold growing all around you the