nd myself were daily companions. Spring, with
its cowslips and primroses, and hawthorn blossoms, found us rambling
through the woods and fields, and angling for the finny tribe disporting in
the purling waters of the crystal Avon.

Summer brought its grain and fruits, with boys and girls scrambling over
hedges, fences, stiles and brooks, in search of berries and ripe apples;
autumn with its nuts, birds and hares, invited us to hunting grounds, along
the rolling ridges and the dense forest of Arden, even poaching on the
domain of Sir Thomas Lucy and the royal reaches of Warwick Castle, and old
winter with his snowy locks and whistling airs brought the roses to our
young cheeks, skipping and sporting through his fantastic realm like the
snow birds whirling in clumps of clouds across the withered world.

Looking back over the fields, forests and waters of the past through the
variegated realms of celestial imagination, I behold after the lapse of
more than three centuries of human wrecks, the brilliant boys and glorious
girls I played with in childhood years--still shining as bright and fresh
as the flowers and fruits of yesterday!

_"For we are the same our fathers have been,
We see the same sights our fathers have seen,
We drink the same streams and view the same sun,
And run the same course our fathers have run!"_

I remember well the first time Will and myself attended a theatrical
performance. It was on the first of April, 1573, when we were about nine
years of age.

A strolling band of comic, and Punch and Judy players had made a sudden
invasion of Stratford and established themselves in the big barn of the old
Bear Tavern on Bridge street.

The town was alive with expectation and the school children were wild to
behold the great play of "The Scolding Wife," which was advertised through
the streets, in the daytime, by a cartload of bedizened harlequins,
belaboring each other with words and gestures, the wife with bare arms,
short dress and a bundle of rods, standing rampant over the prostrate form
of a drunken husband.

Fifes, drums and timbrels kept up a frantic noise, filling the bylanes and
streets of Stratford with astonished country louts and tradesmen, until the
fantastic parade ended in the wagon yard of the tavern.

The old barn had been rigged up as a rustic playhouse, the stage covering
one end, elevated about three feet from the threshing floor. Curtains with
daub pictures were str