The great poet began to walk up and down and round about over the grass with the impunity of disembodied spirits, and being dematerialized and devisibilized for our more convenient association in the place, I joined him without attracting the notice of the gardener, who was busy watching that predatory visitors did not pillage the beds of their late summer flowers, as they passed down the walk from the house, and round and out by the garden gate. There was a constant stream of visitors, and I said to my companion: "How does all this affect you, this influx and efflux of people, who after three hundred years have read you, or heard of you, or would like to have read you, or to whom you're at least such an object of interest that no traveler ought to miss seeing your Birthplace?"

"How do you mean?"

"Does their devotion bless you or ban you? Is it a joy or a bore? To me it looks like a perpetual afternoon tea where people are asked 'To have the honor of meeting the memory of William Shakespeare,' and expect somehow to feel that they're with you."

"Well, I don't know," he answered, thoughtfully. "It isn't so bad as to have to stand tangibly in the middle of the Museum and shake hands with them all. They don't know that I'm personally present, and in fact I'm not here, for the most part."

"Yes, I understand that. But I suppose what I am trying to get at is whether the sense of their admiration is still as sweet as ever? Do you care for it as much as one does for a favorable notice of his new book with suggestive extracts? Something like that."

"No, I shouldn't say I did; though not because it's rather an old story now. The fact is that their admiration rather searches out the seamy side of my work, where I've put it together and patched it out with that material of the older playwrights which we Elizabethans used to draw from. It isn't pleasant to have people thinking it's all mine, you know."

"I understand. But I don’t understand how they ever mistake the work you helped yourself to for your own work. It seems to me that I can tell the borrowed from the created down to the last syllable. I make out that you helped yourself most in the comedies; at least I have to skip the most in them. You don't mind my skipping?"

"Oh, I skip a good deal myself; and yes, I used the paste and scissors most in the comedies; scarcely at all in the tragedies, even those dramatized from the old Italian stories. But at the time I was doing my things, I didn't distinguish much in the result. When I had got it on the stage all right, it seemed entirely mine, you know. It was when it came to printing the things that I began to feel the force of Polonius's injunction: 'Neither a borrower nor a lender he.' I saw then that I had borrowed more than I should ever lend. But I didn't worry much. You know I was rather lazy about the printed plays; I never read the proofs; and of course I never 'blotted a line' in the printed text any more than the written. After I came back to Stratford I left the whole affair to the compositors and the actors. I was pretty thoroughly tired."

"I can imagine that. And this ever-gathering volume, this constantly increasing reverberation of men's praise, how does that affect you?"

''Well, you know, not so unpleasantly as you might think. I suppose I'm rather simple about it. My London success didn't make me very conscious, I believe. At the time I didn't always feel it was me they were praising. One loses identity in those experiences. I didn't always feel as if I had done the things, and they have gone on ever since becoming more and more impersonal to me. I don't know whether I make myself quite clear. _ But that's the way I manage to stand it."

"Yes, I see," I said.

"What I had done well seemed to become part of the great mass of good work done that belonged to nobody in particular."

"I don't know that I should altogether like that," I demurred.

Shakespeare laughed genially. "Well, you would if you had done much good work. Now you want to keep your little own all your own."

I was wondering what to say when a dreadful inaudible voice struck upon my inner ear in no-tones of inexpressible tragedy, "And the evil done, the sin, the wrong?"

It was Bacon who had joined us, speaking to Shakespeare, and Shakespeare, nothing surprised at his presence, unanswered: "Why, even more the evil than the good. Haven't you said, somewhere" — he turned to me in asking, and I perceived a delicate intention of soothing the hurt to my self-love which his snub had given — "haven't you said, somewhere, that when we own a sin, whether to others or to our consciences, we disown it, and it becomes a part of the general evil in the world?"

"Why, it seems to me that I did say that," I answered, gratified to my inmost soul. "But how did you know — "

"Never mind, never mind," he said, laying his hand caressingly on my shoulder. "Haven't I told you that we read everything? We have no end of leisure."

The somber shade of Bacon remained silently ignoring this exchange of civilities. At last he said to me, "And from what experience of yours did you learn that truth?''

"Oh, come!" Shakespeare answered, lightly. "Isn't this asking?"

I stood recalling my many sins and hesitating which I should credit with the suggestion of my dark wisdom. "Well, I don't know," I parleyed; but I saw that Bacon really cared nothing for my sins, and was only thinking of his own.

"If I could believe that!" he passionately declared. "No sinner ever made opener or ampler avowal of his guilt than I did."

"You couldn't help it, my dear friend," Shakespeare put in, with a smile which if mocking was tenderly mocking. "You had been tried and convicted by your peers before you owned up. Your sin had found you out, and I fancy that our brave moralist here means that we must own the sins which haven't found us out if we wish to disown them. I have come to much the same effect by not denying mine, till now I haven't any wish to deny them. But why should you continue to bother about yours? You were guilty of bribery and corruption, but, as you said, all the other judges were. It was a vice of our epoch, like my vices, which I was not ashamed of then, I'm now ashamed to say. My comedies abound in the filth of them, though not so much as some other people's comedies; and I dare say there were judges more venal than you. But perhaps it's the sin which you didn't own; perhaps it was the case of — "

"Essex?" the unhappy ghost demanded. "Haven't I owned it to him a thousand times? Haven't I pursued him through all the timeless and spaceless reaches of eternity with my unavailing remorse? Hasn't he forgiven me, entreated me to forgive myself, with that goodness of his which abounded to me in my unfriended need with every generous office of praise and per-se, and which I repaid by hunting him to his death? Don't tell me that in a few years he must have died even if I had not slain him! Don't tell me that so open a rebel as he must have suffered death, even if I had not shut the gates of mercy on him. I, who owed him far dearer and truer allegiance than I owed that wretched old woman whom I called my sovereign, and whom I thought to serve to my own glory and profit by persecuting my friend!"

Shakespeare looked at him with a curious kind of pity. "What a tragedy you could have written! How you could have out-Hamleted and out-Macbethed me!"

"Why not do it yet?" I appealed to them both. "I am sure that any of our editors would be glad to print it, and it would be only a step from the magazine to the stage. With our improved psychical facilities it would be easy to find some adequate medium — "

The abject spirit's mood changed, and he demanded, scornfully: "And prove that I wrote ' Hamlet' and 'Macbeth,' too? No, thanks. I couldn't do anything to re-open that chapter. And if I must say it, I don't envy the author of those plays the gross and palpable renown which he enjoys from them. I can bear what I must bear till somehow I am released from my burden; people don't know how bad I am; many never heard of me as a recreant friend or a corrupt magistrate; they only know me as the author of the inductive method, which they don't understand, or as the putative author of Shakespeare's plays, which they haven't read, not even the fatuous thirteen thousand Americans who annually visit his Birthplace — the Birthplace where he first came to live after he was a well-grown boy! Of all the hollow unrealities, of all the juiceless husks which human vanity feeds on, literary glory seems to me the emptiest and dryest. If among those thirteen thousand Americans, or the hundred thousand other pilgrims who troop annually to this supposititous shrine, there were one utterly sincere and modest soul; if in this whole town of Stratford there were one simple lower-class person who loved Shakespeare for himself, or cared for him, or even knew of him, I would grant him some joy of his swollen celebrity, his Falstaffian bulk of fame stuffed out with straw."

" I have thought of that," I put in, while Shakespeare remained placidly smiling. " It's a point that I've wanted to test. We all knew how the comfortable and cultivated people feel about our great and good friend, but I've been curious, ever since I came to Stratford, to know how people who are not particularly comfortable and not at all cultivated feel about him. I believe I have in mind just the person to apply to," and at my volition there came a sort of tremor such as when the pictures change at the movies, and we were standing in the little cluttered shop of the kind woman who sold me the plums for my lunches.

While she was doing up the pound, half of green gages and half of victorias, which I ordered, I said: "Oh, by the way, my friends and I here" — she stared, and I explained — ''here in Strafford, have been wondering how much the townspeople, the tradespeople, the workpeople really know or care about Shakespeare. What do you think?"

"What do I — no, it's only sevenpence, sir; a penny less than for all green gages — what do I think?"

"Yes. Do you honestly care anything about Shakespeare?"

She looked up a little bewildered. Then she said,

"Why, how could we live without him, sir?"

The ghostly presence of the poet laughed inaudibly out. "There you have it! I am my townsmen's stock in trade, their livelihood, their job! They couldn't live without me! Well, I'm not sorry if that's what I come to with them."

"At any rate, in that you come to something real,” the philosopher assented.