When I did see the motor-train I was richly content with it, and more content as time (a good deal of time) went on. The train was formed of one long car, with a smoking and a baggage compartment at the forward end, the rest opening airily into a saloon with seats on each side, as in our pleasant day-coaches at home. We had tried in vain to buy first-class tickets, and now we had all this delight at third-class rates, which alone are recognized on motor-trains. We slipped sleekly out of Cheltenham, which tried to detain us at two suburban stations (halts, such stops are called on the motor route), and sleekly ran through the grain-fields and meadow-lands and broad-bean patches, where the yellowing wheat stood dense, hanging its blond heads, and the haycocks covered the ground almost as thickly as the unfallen stems, and the lentils blackened in innumerable sheaves, and all the landscape stretched away in dreamy levels to a low horizon, where the afternoon hid them in its mellow mists. There were so few people in the car that we could change from side to side and seat to seat, and when we had done with the landscape we could give ourselves to conjecture of our fellow-passengers. Two of these were ladies, each reading a copy of The Nation (the London, not the New York one), and I tried my best to make out from it who and what they were, but I had arrived at no more than the conclusion that they were persons of intellectual as well as social quality, when they rose together from the place where they were sitting and left the car at I forget just what halt. I followed them with famishing curiosity, but when the train started again I was obliged to try doing what I could with their vacant places.

Then I found that their places were not really vacant, but were taken by the companions who had sat together in front of us at the open-air theater the night before. I was glad to note that by daylight they seemed more substantial than they had looked in the glare of the electric-lamps. It was as if they had chosen to put off whatever had been apparitional about them, and to be plain middle-aged Englishmen of comfortable condition. I observed that the stouter of the two now wore a Norfolk jacket, with knickerbockers and low tan shoes, as if he chose to do something more rustic in his dress than the other, who was dressed as if he had just come down from the waning season in London, and had not yet got into his outing things. I fancied that in this effect he was choosing not to be mixed up in anybody's mind with the Bank-Holiday makers, who were already swarming over the country, and were giving every outward token of having a whole three days off; for it was Saturday afternoon, and Monday would be the great day of all. There was something less than kind in his melancholy, and yet I could not have said that he looked so much unkind as reserved in the bearing by which each of us declares his habitual feeling toward others. It was as if he were not precisely offended by the existence of common men, but incommoded; they kept him not perhaps from thinking of himself, but from thinking of things infinitely more important to him than they were. I was most struck with this sort of aloofness from his species, this philosophic abstraction, when at our coming to Broadway his companion spoke of the different artists who had first colonized the place. I had never been there, but it was dear to me because my chief association with it was the memory of a many-gifted friend who might have been almost any sort of artist, but chose mainly to be a painter till the sea engulfed him with the others that went down in the Titanic. I wondered if I should perhaps see the house where that dear, sunny-eyed F. M. lived, not mattering that I should not know it if I did see it; and I fancied a curious sympathy with my mood in the gayer of the companions which was absent from the gloomier one. It was not so much that he did not care, as that he could not; his thoughts were fixed on those abstractions in which he was himself the center and the sole concrete. I thought that if I had told the first about my friendship with the bright spirit so tragically quenched he would have understood, and would have said, perhaps, the fittingest thing that could be said. But as it was I could only catch a phrase or two of the talk which I tried to eavesdrop, and heard such words as "one of among the many lovely Rosalinds," and "beautiful young American actress," who had come to England, but soon married off the stage, and now lived the genius of that place. It did not seem to interest the other, who remained fallen in a sort of bitter muse, till we reached the station where we changed from our pleasant, roomy motor to the crowded express. The porter ran far forward along the train before he could find places for us, and he had so much difficulty that we began to hope he would be obliged to put us into a first-class compartment with our third-class tickets, when he got seats of the right grade of our transportation, and we rode the rest of the way to Stratford in a car so near the locomotive that it was blind with the smoke and choking with the coal-gas.

It was a very long ride; but suddenly, before we expected, we had arrived, and those two companions stepped out of the car just before us. I heard the stout gentleman say, cheerily, but with a touch of friendly irony in his words, "Welcome to Stratford, my lord of St. Albans!" If I had then any lingering doubt who the pair were I must have known beyond any misgiving that they were William Shakespeare and Francis Bacon, but why they should have come there together on terms of such incredible reconciliation I shall, perhaps, never be able to make clear to the impartial reader; as for their respective partizans I despair of them absolutely. I wished to seize the friendlier phantasm of the two, and force him to some explanation, and I suppose I must have made a clutch at the incorporal air where I had last seen him; but a vigilant young porter mistook my gesture as an appeal for his help. He seized our hand baggage, and with the demand, "Any luggage in the van, sir?" hurried us away through the Bank-Holiday makers, already arrived in swarms that Saturday afternoon, and staring about in the distraction which lasted with them for the next sixty hours at least. They thronged the roadways as well as the footways of the old town (which I shall try to keep throughout this narrative from calling quaint), and they would have had my cheap commiseration in their air of vague bewilderment and apprehension of something worse than they were already suffering if I had not been anxious in my doubt whether we should find The Spotted Pard all that we had hoped a small hotel might be when we wired for rooms from Cheltenham. The holiday makers stood about in helpless groups, or streamed, men and maids, and mothers and fathers with footsore children at their heels and toes, and mutely made way for the motor we had found at the station offering itself for the same fare as a fly, and now carrying us and our piled-up trunks to The Spotted Pard for the one-and-six which at home would have translated themselves into two-and-sixty of our little-buying dollars and cents. It was such a quiet, kind-looking, patient crowd, so Englishly single-minded and good-tempered, that I was glad to have our chauffeur consider it humanely in his course; and I did not feel it so very molestful as I might in my vision of the streets and houses, which, from once seeing them years before, I now found so familiar. They did somewhat clutter these charming perspectives which so many streets in Stratford open from the sort of central quadrangle before the Town Hall; and an early stroll before dinner showed them filling the river with their skiffs, and punts and canoes, and droning and whining out the tunes of their blatant gramophones. But people whose holidays are few do not know how to fit themselves becomingly into the general scene, or to take their joy without the vulgarity which it comes so easy for us betters of theirs to avoid. The great thing is for them to have their holiday, and it is no little thing for us finer folk to recognize the vast difference between ourselves and them. The town received them with the hospitality which was none the less sincere because it was commercial; but even for money it could not house them all, and it remains a wonder to me how the most of them got roofs over their heads for the night. Well toward midnight a policeman was seen going about with a party of Americans, richly able and eager to pay for lodgings, and knocking at every promising and unpromising door to demand shelter for them. I am sorry to leave that party of compatriots still walking the streets; they were probably only a little less undeserving than ourselves, who had thought to wire for rooms at The Spotted Pard.

But even then I did not think ourselves treated in the measure of our merit as the night wore away after we had gone to sleep in them. They were pretty rooms, very fresh of paper and paint, in an ell or extension; but with the falling damp outside a strong musty smell as of old hay began to rise from the floor within. It was so strong that it roused the sleepers from their first sleep and kept them from their second till well toward morning. Then I was haunted in my dream by the noise of a ghostly thumping, such as horses and even cows make in the vigils which they seem able to keep, and not suffer the anguish of insomnia. Without waking or at all ceasing from my indignation at having been given rooms in what might once have been a hay-loft, I was aware that the noise I heard was no stamping of horses or cattle, but the muffled blows which Shakespeare was dealing on the doors of inns and lodgings with a demand for shelter, so that his valued and honored friend Francis Bacon, Lord Verulam and Viscount of St. Albans, should not be obliged to spend the night in the street.