He did not buy New Place till 1597, but it is known that in the meantime he came to his native town once every year. It was in Stratford that his son Hamnet died, in 1596. Anne and her children probably had never left the town. They show a bedstead and other bits of furniture, together with certain homespun sheets of everlasting linen, that are kept as heirlooms in the garret of the Shottery cottage. Here is the room that may often have welcomed the poet when he came home from his labours in the great city. It is a homely and humble place, but the sight of it makes the heart thrill with a strange and incommunicable awe. You cannot wish to speak when you are standing there. You are scarcely conscious of the low rustling of the leaves outside, the far-off sleepy murmur of the brook, or the faint fragrance of woodbine and maiden's-blush that is wafted in at the open casement and that swathes in nature's incense a memory sweeter than itself. Associations may be established by fable as well as by fact. There is but little reason to believe the legendary tale, first recorded by Rowe, that Shakespeare, having robbed the deer-park of Sir Thomas Lucy of Charlecote (there was not a park at Charlecote then, but there was one at Fullbrooke), was so severely persecuted by that magistrate that he was compelled to quit Stratford and shelter himself in London. Yet the story has twisted itself into all the lives of Shakespeare, and whether received or rejected has clung to the house of Charlecote. That noble mansion--a genuine specimen, despite a few modern alterations, of the architecture of Queen Elizabeth's time--is found on the west bank of the Avon, about three miles north-east from Stratford. It is a long, rambling, three-storied palace--as finely quaint as old St. James's in London, and not altogether unlike that edifice, in general character--with octagon turrets, gables, balustrades, Tudor casements, and great stacks of chimneys, so closed in by elms of giant growth that you can scarce distinguish it, through the foliage, till you are close upon it. Illustration: "Charlecote."