"Nothing. That's just it. There's hardly anything known about the man. He was born here--died here. He went to London and acted. One of his contemporaries says that the top of his performance was the Ghost in 'Hamlet.' He married, he had children, he got hold of money enough to buy a house, he got a coat of arms, he lent money and dunned people for it, he speculated in corn, he made a will in which he mentions neither his plays nor his books, but is very particular about his second-best bed and his silver-gilt bowl. He died, and was buried. That's all that's known about him. I'm not a Baconian, Princess, but I'm pretty sure that whoever wrote 'Hamlet,' that frowzy, money-grubbing provincial never did." "But we'll go and see his birthplace, all the same, won't we?" she said. And they went. If she desired to worship at the shrine of Shakespeare he did not give her much chance. She listened to the talk of the caretaker, but always he was at her ear with the tale of how often Shakespeare's chair had been sold and replaced by a replica, how the desk shown as his is that of an eighteenth-century usher and not of a sixteenth-century scholar. How the ring engraved "W. S." was found in the surface of the ground, near the church, in 1810, where, one supposes, it had lain unnoticed since Shakespeare dropped it there two hundred years before. At the grammar-school Edward pointed out that there is no evidence to show that Shakespeare ever attended this or any other school. Anne Hathaway's cottage could not be allowed to be Anne Hathaway's, since it was only in 1770 that its identity was fixed on, two other houses having previously shared the honor. Like her husband, she would seem to have possessed the peculiar gift of being born in three places at once. "I don't think I like it," she said at last. "I'd rather believe everything they say. It's such a very big lot of lies, if they are lies. Let's go to the church. The man's grave's his own, I suppose." "I suppose so," said he, but not with much conviction; "anyhow, I won't bore you with any more of the stuff. But it _is_ a fine mystery, and there's a corner of me that would like to live in Bloomsbury and grub among books all day at the British Mu. and half the night in my booky little den, and see if I couldn't find something out. But the rest of me wants different things, out-of-door things, and things that lead to something more than finding the key to a door locked three hundred years ago." The bust of Shakespeare in Stratford Church is a great blow to the enthusiast. A stubby, sensual, Dutch-looking face. "I wish they'd been content with the gravestone," she said, and read aloud the words: "Goodfrend for Jesus sake forbeare To digg the dust encloasèd heare Blest be ye man yt spares these stones And curst be he yt moves my bones."