who proposes to visit the historic shrines of Old England. Its
associations with Britain's immortal bard and with our own gentle
Geoffrey Crayon are not unfamiliar to the veriest layman, and no fewer
than thirty thousand pilgrims, largely from America, visit the
delightful old town each year. And who ever came away disappointed? Who,
if impervious to the charm of the place, ever dared to own it?

My first visit to Stratford-on-Avon was in the regulation fashion.
Imprisoned in a dusty and comfortless first-class apartment--first-class
is an irony in England when applied to railroad travel, a mere excuse
for charging double--we shot around the curves, the glorious
Warwickshire landscapes fleeting past in a haze or obscured at times by
the drifting smoke. Our reveries were rudely interrupted by the shriek
of the English locomotive--like an exaggerated toy whistle--and, with a
mere glimpse of town and river, we were brought sharply up to the
unattractive station of Stratford-on-Avon. We were hustled by an
officious porter into an omnibus, which rattled through the streets
until we landed at the Sign of the Red Horse; and the manner of our
departure was even the same.

Just two years later, after an exhilarating drive of two or three hours
over the broad, well-kept highway winding through the parklike fields,
fresh from May showers, between Worcester and Stratford, our motor
finally climbed a long hill, and there, stretched out before us, lay the
valley of the Avon. Far away we caught the gleam of the immortal river,
and rising from a group of splendid trees we beheld Trinity
Church--almost unique in England for its graceful combination of massive
tower and slender spire--the literary shrine of the English-speaking
world, the enchanted spot where Shakespeare sleeps. About it were
clustered the clean, tiled roofs of the charming town, set like a gem in