From Edinburgh to London we take the Great Western Railway, one of the best managed in the kingdom. Already we have learned that we have no more “baggage,” and how to “own our luggage;” that there are no cars in this country, but carriages, and “luggage vans.” The man who locks us in our own compartment is not a conductor, but a “guard;” we hear nothing of railroads, but a good deal of “ways” and trains. After days of steady running hither and thither, to see this, to hear that, to learn the other, it is agreeable to lean back and doze and dream while the swift train bears us away from the highlands and the heather. We sleep in England at the quaint old Roman town of Chester, and take time enough in the morning to visit the cathedral, walk through the queer streets where the covered sidewalk for foot passengers is on the roofs, and the carriage-way is sunken several feet below the level of the road. Anxious as we were to reach London, we could not resist stopping at Warwick for a couple of days, resting at the Old Warwick Arms, and crowding every hour with a living interest hardly to be aroused in any other part of England. For from this point a drive of eight miles through a charming country takes us to Stratford-on-Avon, and to the oft-described home and tomb of Shakspere. This is almost always a white day in the tourist’s memory, for, through all the delightful drive, at the house of Shakspere, in the room where he was born, by the desk at which he sat at school, in the cottage of Ann Hathaway, and by his tomb in the church, one feels in a new world. A crowd of visitors may throng the cottage and the house, and one hears all sorts of chatter, but they and we and all modern folk seem strange and out of place. And I doubt not many minds have found it hard to associate the place with Shakspere at all. It doesn’t suit our idea of the man or his work, and it is hard to dispossess the mind of the idea that we are lending ourselves to a little farce. We drive slowly back along the Avon at sunset, and give a second day to Warwick Castle and a drive to the ruins of Kenilworth. In the former we have the best representation of an old English castle that we shall see; one all the more impressive because it is the first seen; in the latter the grandest ruin that England can show. Both have many historical associations, but we have not yet escaped from the dominion of Scott, and have just re-read his “Kenilworth,” and naturally look for traces of Queen Bess, and of Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, whose tomb is in the Church of St. Mary in Warwick. So we sit down under the ivy-crowned battlements, and listen while one reads aloud the account of the five days of entertainment that Leicester gave the Queen, and imagination peoples the ruined banquet hall with the knights and ladies fair who made the place so gay.