astle with Shakespeare,
Walter Scott, Mary Ann Evans and a youth I used to know in boyhood by the
name of Bill Hursey. We chased each other across the drawbridge, through
the portcullis, down the slippery stones into the donjon-keep, around the
moat, and up the stone steps to the topmost turret of the towers. Finally
Shakespeare was "it," but he got mad and refused to play. Walter Scott
said it was "no fair," and Bill Hursey thrust out the knuckle of one
middle finger in a very threatening way and offered to "do" the boy from
Stratford. Then Mary Ann rushed in to still the tempest. There's no
telling what would have happened had not the landlady just then rapped at
my door and asked if I had called. I awoke with a start and with the
guilty feeling that I had been shouting in my sleep. I saw it was
morning. "No--that is, yes; my shaving-water, please."

After breakfast the landlady's boy offered for five shillings to take me
in his donkey-cart to the birthplace of George Eliot. He explained that
the house was just seven miles north; but Baalam's express is always
slow, so I concluded to walk. At Coventry a cab-owner proposed to show me
the house, which he declared was near Kenilworth, for twelve shillings.
The advantages of seeing Kenilworth at the same time were dwelt upon at
great length by cabby, but I harkened not to the voice of the siren. I
got a good lunch at the hotel, and asked the innkeeper if he could tell
me where George Eliot was born. He did not know, but said he could show
me a house around the corner where a family of Eliots lived.

Then I walked on to Nuneaton. A charming walk it was; past quaint old
houses, some with straw-thatched roofs, others tile--roses clambering
over the doors and flowering hedgerows white with hawthorn-flowers.

Occasionally, I met a farmer's cart drawn by one of those great, fat,
gentle Shire horses that George Eliot has described so well. All spoke of
peace and plenty, quiet and rest. The green fields and the flowers, the
lark-song and the sunshine, the dipping willows by the stream, and the
arch of the old stone bridge as I approached the village--all these I had
seen and known and felt before from "Mill on the Floss."

I found the house where they say the novelist was born. A plain,
whitewashed, stone structure, built two hundred years ago; two stories,
the upper chambers low, with gable-windows; a little garden at the side
bright with flowers, where sweet marjoram vied wit