ung people were straying. I wondered if the
youthful swains quoted Shakespeare to their ladyloves. Could they help
recalling Romeo and Juliet? It is quite impossible to think of any human
being growing up in this place which claims Shakespeare as its child,
about the streets of which he ran as a boy, on the waters of which he
must have often floated, without having his image ever present. Is it
so? There are some boys, from eight to ten or a dozen years old, fishing
in the Avon, close by the grounds of "Avonbank," the place at which we
are staying. I call to the little group. I say, "Boys, who was this man
Shakespeare, people talk so much about?" Boys turn round and look up
with a plentiful lack of intelligence in their countenances. "Don't you
know who he was nor what he was?" Boys look at each other, but confess
ignorance.--Let us try the universal stimulant of human faculties. "Here
are some pennies for the boy that will tell me what that Mr. Shakespeare
was." The biggest boy finds his tongue at last. "He was a writer,--he
wrote plays." That was as much as I could get out of the youngling. I
remember meeting some boys under the monument upon Bunker Hill, and
testing their knowledge as I did that of the Stratford boys. "What is
this great stone pillar here for?" I asked. "Battle fought here,--great
battle." "Who fought?" "Americans and British." (I never hear the
expression Britishers.) "Who was the general on the American side?"
"Don' know,--General Washington or somebody."--What is an old battle,
though it may have settled the destinies of a nation, to the game of
base-ball between the Boston and Chicago Nines which is to come off
to-morrow, or to the game of marbles which Tom and Dick are just going
to play together under the shadow of the great obelisk which
commemorates the conflict?

The room more especially assigned to me looked out, at a distance of not
more than a stone's-throw, on the northern aspect of the church where
Shakespeare lies buried. Workmen were busy on the roof of the transept.
I could not conveniently climb up to have a talk with the roofers, but I
have my doubts whether they were thinking all the time of the dust over
which they were working. How small a matter literature is to the great
seething, toiling, struggling, love-making, bread-winning,
child-rearing, death-awaiting men and women who fill this huge,
palpitating world of ours! It would be worth while to pass a week or a
month among the