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the country north of the Avon, out ta Nuneaton and Birmingham. We can fancy how the boys stole out to watch the Grevilles and Leycesters and Lucys and Verneys on some great hunting party, and whispered to each other,

“Under this thick-grown brake we ’ll shroud ourselves,
For through this lawnd anon the deer will come.”

But the time of all others in the year that we connect most closely with Shakspere is the sweet spring-time, when the long cold winter—very long and very cold among those undrained clay-lands of Warwickshire—had come to an end. How closely little Will watched for

“daffodils,
That come before the swallow dares, and take
The winds of March with beauty”;

and for

“violets, cowslips, and pale primroses.”

We can fancy the little boys hunting in some sheltered nook in the Welcombe woods for the first primroses; and climbing up Borden Hill just beyond Shottery, perhaps with Anne Hathaway from the pretty old house in the orchards below, to the bank—the only one in the neighborhood,—

“where the wild thyme blows,
Where oxlips, and the nodding violet grows”;

or wandering over the flat sunny meadows along the Avon valley, picking cowslips, and looking into each tiny yellow bell for the spots in their gold coats,—

“Those he rubies, fairy favors,
In those freckles live their savors,”—

as they brought home baskets of the flower-heads for their mother to make into cowslip wine.

Spring, in this Stratford country, is exquisite, The woods are carpeted with primroses and wild hyacinths; while in the “merry month of May” the nightingale swarms among the hawthorn trees white with blossom,

On every yillage green there stood a painted May pole—one is still standing at Weston, near Stratford; and May-Day is still kept in Warwickshire with a “May feast” upon old May-Day, the 12th of May. Every one knows how the prettiest girl in the village was chosen Queen o’ the May, and how all joined in the “Whitsun Morris-dance.” A bunch of cowslips.

Long Marston,—“Dancing Marston,” as it has been called ever since Shakspere’s time,—a few miles from Stratford, was famous till within the memory of man for a troop of Morris-dancers, who went about from village to village, strangely dressed, to dance at all the feasts. Shakspere probably had the Marsten dancers in his mind when he wrote of the “three carters, three shepherds, three neat-herds, three swine-herds,” that made themselves all “men of hair,” and called themselves “Saltiers,” at the sheep-shearing feast which pretty Perdita presided over, in “The Winter’s Tale.” The sheep-shearing feast, which came when roses were out on the hedges and in the gardens, must have been a merry and important time for the Shakspere boys. John Shakspere was, of course, specially interested in the price of a