If the Warwick and Stratford reaches of the Avon are best known, as is only natural, its lower portions as a river are beyond question the more beautiful. In the former the scenery through which it flows, though possessed of the graciousness of the Midlands, has also its limitations. Halfway between Stratford and Evesham, however, as the traveller tops the hill which runs down into the riverside village of Bidford, the traditional scene of Shakespeare's drinking bout, the Avon would seem to be entering into almost another country as the vale of Evesham lies spread before him. For this is something more than glorified Midland in scale and distinction, and the flavour of the West Country would almost seem to be upon it. The Cotswolds rise steadily to the heights of Broadway and Cleeve upon the south; the great humpy mass of Bredon Hill seems to lie right athwart the vale, while in the no remote distance the amazingly bold peaks of the Malverns look like some range of Welsh mountains that have strayed eastward and lost their way. The people of Evesham, like those of Warwick and Stratford, have widened and beautified the Avon as it washes the foot of the green slopes on which the noble belfry of Abbot Lichfield, barely finished at the Dissolution, alone marks the site of the once splendid Abbey. Between Stratford and Evesham the long ridge of Edgehill, where the first great battle of the Civil War was fought, rises away to the south, and the villages by inference or evidence associated with Shakespeare's life are all about the stream. The Avon has already passed by many scenes characteristic of its sober charms--Wellford Bridge and Bidford, Cleeve Prior and Offenham. Flowing through the garden of England, the Vale of Evesham, where thousands of acres of plum and damson, apple and pear make a matchless blaze of bloom in springtime, there is not a dull mill upon its banks between here and its confluence with the Severn. Swollen by the entry of the Stour near Stratford, it runs henceforward a good brimming stream, where in many parts two or three boats can row abreast. Shooting down the weir and with great stir below upon gravel reaches about Chadbury Mill, gliding peacefully under the woods and lawns of Fladbury to another weir and another mill, it winds along to Pershore, the second of its three abbey towns, with the beautiful portion of its great abbey church still standing intact.