It is eight miles from Warwick to Stratford by the direct road, but ten by the river.  I have walked both routes and consider the latter the shorter.

Two miles down the river is Barford, and a mile farther is Wasperton, with its quaint old stone church.  It is a good place to rest:  for nothing is so soothing as a cool church where the dim light streams through colored windows, and out of sight somewhere an organ softly plays.  Soon after leaving the church a rustic swain hailed me and asked for a match.  The pipe and the Virginia weed—­they mean amity the world over.  If I had questions to ask, now was the time!  So I asked, and Rusticus informed me that Hampton Lucy was only a mile beyond and that Shakespeare never stole deer at all; so I hope we shall hear no more of that libelous accusation.

“But did Shakespeare run away?” I demanded.

“Ave coorse he deed, sir; ’most all good men ’ave roon away sometime!”

And come to think of it Rusticus is right.

Most great men have at some time departed hastily without leaving orders where to forward their mail.  Indeed, it seems necessary that a man should have “run away” at least once, in order afterward to attain eminence.  Moses, Lot, Tarquin, Pericles, Demosthenes, Saint Paul, Shakespeare, Rousseau, Voltaire, Goldsmith, Hugo—­but the list is too long to give.

But just suppose that Shakespeare had not run away!  And to whom do we owe it that he did leave—­Justice Shallow or Ann Hathaway, or both?  I should say to Ann first and His Honor second.  I think if Shakespeare could write an article for “The Ladies’ Home Journal” on “Women Who Have Helped Me,” and tell the whole truth (as no man ever will in print), he would put Ann Hathaway first.

He signed a bond when eighteen years old agreeing to marry her; she was twenty-six.  No record is found of the marriage.  But we should think of her gratefully, for no doubt it was she who started the lad off for London.

That’s the way I expressed it to my new-found friend, and he agreed with me, so we shook hands and parted.

Charlcote is as fair as a dream of Paradise.  The winding Avon, full to its banks, strays lazily through rich fields and across green meadows, past the bright red-brick pile of Charlcote Mansion.  The river-bank is lined with rushes, and in one place I saw the prongs of antlers shaking the elders.  I sent a shrill whistle and a stick that way, and out ran four fine deer that loped gracefully across the turf.  The sight brought my poacher instincts to the surface, but I bottled them, and trudged on until I came to the little church that stands at the entrance to the park.

All mansions, castles and prisons in England have chapels or churches attached.  And this is well, for in the good old days it seemed wise to keep in close communication with the other world.  For often, on short notice, the proud scion of royalty was compelled hastily to pack a ghostly valise and his him hence with his battered soul; or if he did not go himself he compelled others to do so, and who but a brute would kill a man without benefit of the clergy!  So each estate hired its priests by the year, just as men with a taste for litigation hold attorneys in constant retainer.