The Pageant which began the August festival at Stratford was only the beginning. It ended at noon; the other things went on the whole month; and I am not sure that the pageant had quite got its paint off before the song, the dance, the masque, the play, and the lecture were in full tide of joyance. They went on concurrently, like those streams which meet from different sources and swim together in one channel to the sea; and as you were borne with them you became yourself of their effect if not their origin. You became a part of the general transport, and felt, though you might not altogether look it, the happiness of the town in her greatest son, the greatest of the sons of men. As the days passed in a golden sequence scarcely dimmed by a few cloudy hours, it seemed as if there could never be such another August if ever there had been its like before, and the Genius of the festival, whoever he was, must have rejoiced more and more that he had appointed it for the season which Shakespeare might have chosen himself for his natal month rather than the raw April that chillily welcomed him into the world. Of course the right Shakespeare festivals are and have been held on and about his accepted birthday, but if the gradual rise of the August celebrations has been from a sense of his own imaginable preference, I should feel it a very graceful compliance. I should not think their coincidence with the greatest Bank Holiday of the year would be offensive to his memory; he would not probably have objected to sharing them with the middle, and lower middle, and unqualifiedly lower, classes who then flood the whole English land and who seem to wash through his native town in tides that rise yearly higher. If he seems in his plays to show little specific sympathy with the groundlings that is no doubt because he was himself a groundling, or very near it, and knew, as they know, that as groundlings they were no better than their betters. But this is a point which he was to touch upon later, when I brought it home to him in one of those tacit colloquies we were often holding in Stratford.

As for his actual, or putative birthday, I have ventured a conjecture of the English April's chilliness in the sixteenth century because I have found April so cold in the twentieth, but, for all I can really say, that famous twenty-third of it may have been one of those rich, soft days, full of dull sunshine when the flowers make haste to. open themselves to the bees, and the birds do their best to flatter the trees that they have made no mistake in budding or even blossoming. In fact, if, as many contend, we know very. little about Shakespeare, we know least of all what sort of weather it was the. day he was bom. This is one of the strongest proofs of the Baconian authorship of his plays; for. if Bacon had been born on that 23d: of. April, we should have known just how the thermometer stood and whether the day was wet, or the spring early or late; he would have noted the facts himself. But. I do not mean to fling this apple of discord among my readers; it was never gathered. in; Stratford; for no such fruit grows there. They have scarcely heard of Bacon in that devoted town, though indeed I found at one of the shops a small bronze door-knocker figuring the Lord Chancellor in the court where he took bribes if he did not actually sell justice; the point has been made in his favor. On the other hand, in a shop-window not far off, the proprietor had sacrificed his very patronymic to the poet's fame in the sign of "Bacon's Shakespeare Restaurant." I was thinking, "How Shakespeare would enjoy seeing this!" when in one of those cinematographic apparitions which he was apt to make in my consciousness, flashing in and out of it as the figures do in the films changing at the moving-picture show, he joined me and consented to share my amusement in it. But I observed that more and more he refused to smile at the cost of a man who had not himself been very tender of his friends while he lived among them here.

As we turned from the window and he led on down the street, he said, kindly, "We must always remember that he is one of the greatest benefactors of the race, and that he suffered greatly."

"And, his atonement, as far as his plea of guilty went, was magnificent. It was one of those supreme things."

"Magnificent, supreme! Yes, but what a tragedy!"

''You could have written it; he couldn't."

"Well, perhaps that one he could."

The incident by no means followed close upon our meeting in New Place gardens, but he had offered no facts yet as to where or how he had disposed of a guest who made even the poet unwelcome in his mother-town. I ventured to fancy, however, that he might have taken for their common shelter one of those pleasant houses which their owners are willing to let furnished in Stratford, together with their servants and the general good will of the place, while they are themselves off on their holidays, at the seaside, or in Brittany or Switzerland. In our own vain search for quarters, we viewed several such houses, as alternatives of the lodgings which were always full-up; and I have finally decided that Shakespeare took a certain pretty cottage which was proposed to us with a garden sloping to the Avon and a punt belonging to it lying at the foot of the lawn. I am rather sorry now that we did not take it ourselves, not only because it had a populous wasps' nest in the center of a flower bed, and a temporary gardener with a carbuncle on his neck and three more coming, but because I should like having lived in a cottage haunted by the greatest poet and the greatest philosopher of all time. We should not have known they were there by day, and by night we should have been so tired with each day's pleasuring, and so drowsy from being up every night at the theater for the Shakespeare plays, that we should not have objected to the ghostly presences that exchanged criticisms of each other's lives and works in our dreams.

It would not be easy to give a true notion of the fullness of each day's pleasuring without seeming to give a false one, and I shall not try to do more than touch here and there on a fact of it. I should not be able to say indeed just how or why we found our favored way, one of the first mornings, to the Parish Parlor where we somehow knew that there was to be folk-singing and folk-dancing, and a lecture about both. Two years earlier we had formed the taste for these joys at a whole day of them in the Memorial Theater, and had vowed ourselves never to miss a chance at them. The songs then were sung and the dances danced by young people and children from the neighboring factories and farms, but now the intending teachers of those gay sciences were being taught by one deeply learned in them and of an impassioned devotion to them. One of the ballads was so modern as to be in celebration of the Shannon's victory over the Chesapeake in the War of 1812, when the American ship went out from Boston to fight the British, and somehow got beaten. It had a derisive refrain of "Yankee Doodle Dandy O," and whether or not the lecturer divined our presence, and imagined our pain from this gibe, it is certain that the next time he gave the ballad to be sung, he adventurously excused it on the ground that it possibly celebrated the only British victory of the war. Nothing could have been handsomer than that and it was in the true Shakespearean spirit of Stratford where fourteen thousand Americans come every year to claim our half of Shakespeare's glory.

Three days of the week the lecturer taught the teachers by precept and example; he talked a little, very simply and unaffectedly, from full knowledge of his theme, and then he called upon the students to sing and dance. He was not above giving them the pitch from his pipe, and then playing the tune on the piano with the accompaniment of a girl violinist; and we could not choose whether we liked the singing or the dancing better. They sang old country ballads and they danced old country ballets, telling stories, and reverting to the primitive earth-worship in the lilting and the stamping and the bell-clashing of the morris dances. The pictures which the learners made in illustration of the lecturer's theme were our unfailing joy, but the first morning we had our soul's content absolute beyond any other fortune when the whole glad school issued from the place, and formed in the middle of the street, where, men and maids together, they took the light of the open day with the witchery of their art, as they wove its patterns with their intercircling shapes and their flying feet and their kerchiefs tossing in the air above their heads. This wild joyance was called a Processional, and it was likewise called Tideswell, after the village where it was first imagined. One morning the lecturer joined in it, and became a part of its warp and woof.

It was a vision of Merry England which the heart could give itself to more trustingly than to any dream of the olden time when, with whatever will, England had far less reason to be merry than now. At last the sense of human brotherhood seems to have penetrated with conscience the legislature long so cold to the double duty law owes the common life. The English lawgiver has perceived that to keep people fairly good it must make them decently happy. Better wages, evener taxes, wholesomer housing, fitter clothing, are very well, but before these comes the right to a fairer part of the general cheer. It was told us that the young people who came to learn these glad tidings at Stratford were all teachers in the national schools, and that they were paid by the government for their pleasure in learning them. Perhaps I have not got it quite right, but it ought to be as I have got it, and at any rate I will leave it so. It is certain that these young men and maids were working as conscientiously at their gay sciences as if they were gloomy ones; the young men in tennis flannels and the maids in the gymnasium wear which left them free to foot it illustratively in the morris and the country dances. Most of the young ladies were housed for the month in a girls' school, with its dormitories and its lawns and groves; others dwelt in tents along the levels of the Avon, where through its willows you could see them from your punt making their afternoon tea, or kindling their fires for the evening meal, all sweetly sylvan, and taking the heart with joy in their workday so like a holiday. They went about the streets of the town in the waterproofs which cloaked the informality of their ballet dress; sometimes the dress was so little ballet that it needed no cloaking, and such a dress we once saw worn late in the afternoon when the wearer had to fly up the street toward the Parish Parlor so as not to be late for the song-and-dance lecture. The dress was blue, and it fluttered about the young ankles as the wearer ran along the wall under some overhanging bushes which claimed her part of their bird-life and flower-life, and thrilled the heart of the beholders with a sense of beauty escaped from some

Then one of those who saw the lovely vision thought, "What a pity Shakespeare could not see that!" and instantly to his inner hearing came the response, "I never miss seeing such things as that," and there at my shoulder the friendly phantom was, or was not, it mattered so little whether or no.