people from the stage, and they were to her little more than audiences
which vanished from her life when the curtain descended. From her earliest
years she had been, in common with many of her countrymen, a passionate
admirer of the great English novelist, Dickens. Much of her leisure was
spent in pilgrimages to the spots round London which he has made immortal.
Now and then, with her brother for a protector, she would go to lunch at
an ancient hostelry in the Borough, where one of the scenes of Dickens'
stories is laid, but which has degenerated now almost to the rank of a
public-house. Here she would try to people the place in fancy with the
characters of the novel. "To listen to the talk of the people at such
places," she once said to me, "was better than any play I ever saw."

Stratford-on-Avon too, was, of course, revisited, and many days were spent
in lingering lovingly over the memorials of her favorite Shakespeare. She
soon became well known to the guardians of the spot, and many privileges
were granted to her not accorded on her first visit, four years before,
when she was regarded but as a unit in the crowd of passing visitors who
throng to the shrine of the great master of English dramatic art. On one
occasion when she was in the church of Stratford-on-Avon, the ancient
clerk asked her if she would mind being locked in while he went home to
his tea. Nothing loath she consented, and remained shut up in the still
solemnity of the place. Kneeling down by the grave of Shakespeare, she
took out a pocket "Romeo and Juliet" and recited Juliet's death scene
close to the spot where the great master, who created her, lay in his long
sleep. But presently the wind rose to a storm, the branches of the
surrounding trees dashed against the windows, darkness spread through the
ghostly aisles, and terror-stricken, Mary fled to the door, glad enough to
be released by the returning janitor.

Rural England with its moss-grown farmhouses, its gray steeples, its white