was not so clear.  In the States somewhere, and in “Ogden’s Valley.”  There was a lake there that had salt in it, and not far off was the sea.  “In America,” she said, and she gave such a sweet and novel twang to her words, “we had a cow of our own, and two horses and a wagon and a dog.”  “Yes,” joined in her little brother, “and nice chickens and a goose.”  “But,” continued the sister, “we owns none o’ them here.  In America ’most everybody owned their houses, and we could ‘a’ owned a house if we had stayid.”

“What made you leave America?” I inquired.

“’Cause me father wanted to see his friends.”

“Did your mother want to come back?”

“No, me mother wanted to stay in America.”

“Is food as plenty here,—­do you have as much to eat as in the States?”

“Oh, yes, and more.  The first year we were in America we could not get enough to eat.”

“But you do not get meat very often here, do you?”

“Quite often,”—­not so confidently.

“How often?”

“Well, sometimes we has pig’s liver in the week time, and we allers has meat of a Sunday; we likes meat.”

Here we emerged from the fields into the highway, and the happy children went their way and I mine.

In the evening, as I was strolling about the town, a poor, crippled, half-witted fellow came jerking himself across the street after me and offered himself as a guide.

“I’m the Teller what showed Artemus Ward around when he was here.  You’ve heerd on me, I expect?  Not?  Why, he characterized me in ‘Punch,’ he did.  He asked me if Shakespeare took all the wit out of Stratford?  And this is what I said to him:  `No, he left some for me.’”

But not wishing to be guided just then, I bought the poor fellow off with a few pence, and kept on my way.

Stratford is a quiet old place, and seems mainly the abode of simple common folk.  One sees no marked signs of either poverty or riches.  It is situated in a beautiful expanse of rich, rolling farming country, but bears little resemblance to a rural town in America:  not a tree, not a spear of grass; the houses packed close together and crowded up on the street, the older ones presenting their gables and showing their structure of oak beams.  English oak seems incapable of decay even when exposed to the weather, while indoors it takes three or four centuries to give it its best polish and hue.

I took my last view of Stratford quite early of a bright Sunday morning, when the ground was white with a dense hoar-frost.  The great church, as I approached it, loomed up under the sun through a bank of blue mist.  The Avon was like glass, with little wraiths of vapor clinging here and there to its surface.  Two white swans stood on its banks in front of the church, and, without regarding the mirror that so drew my eye, preened their plumage; while, farther up, a piebald cow reached down for some grass under the brink where the frost had not settled, and a piebald cow in the river reached up for the same morsel.  Rooks and crows and jackdaws were noisy in the trees overhead and about the church spire.  I stood a long while musing upon the scene.