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Abbey
by
“I wish you were going, too,” said Edwin, huskily. “I believe I will,” said Alfred, swallowing hard. And he did.
The Managing Editor growled furiously, but to no avail, for the Cunarder that bore the boys was then well out toward the Banks.
It was an American that discovered Stratford; and it is the Peter’s pence of American tourists that now largely support the town. At Stratford, Washington Irving jostles the Master for the first place, and when we drink at the George W. Childs fountain we piously pour a libation to all three.
Like all bookish and artistic Americans, when Abbey and Parsons thought of England they thought of Shakespeare’s England–the England that Washington Irving had made plain.
Washington Irving seemed very close to our young men–London held them only a few days and then they started for Stratford. They went afoot, as became men who carried crayons that scorned the steam- horse. They took the road for Oxford and stopped at the tavern where the gossips aver that the author of “Love’s Labor’s Lost” made love to the landlord’s wife–a thing I never would believe, e’en though I knew ‘t were true. From Oxford the young men made their way to storied Warwick, where the portcullis is raised–or lowered, I do not remember which–every evening at sundown to tap of drum. It is the same old Warwick Castle that Shakespeare knew; the same cedars of Lebanon that he saw; the same screaming peacocks; the same circling rooks and daws, and down across the lazy Avon over the meadows the same skylark vibrates the happy air.
Young Abbey saw these things, just as Washington Irving saw them, and he saw them just as the boy William Shakespeare saw them.
Nine miles from Warwick lies Stratford. But at Stratford the tourist is loosed; the picnicker is abroad; the voice of the pedant is heard in the land, and the Baconian is upon us. Abbey and Parsons stopped at the Red Horse Inn and slept in the room that Washington Irving occupied, and they do say now that Irving occupied every room in the house. Stratford was not to the liking of our friends. They wanted to be in the Shakespeare country for six months, that was what the Managing Editor said–six months, mind you. But they did not want to study the tourist. They wanted to be just a little off the beaten track of travel, away from the screech of the locomotive, where they could listen and hear the echoes of a tallyho horn, the crack of the driver’s whip, and the clatter of the coming stagecoach.
The village of Broadway is twelve miles from Stratford, and five miles from the nearest railway-station. The worst thing about the place for a New-Yorker is the incongruity of the name.
In Broadway not a new house has been built for a century, and several of the buildings date back four hundred years. Abbey and Parsons found a house they were told was built in Fifteen Hundred Sixty-three. The place was furnished complete, done by those who had been dust a hundred years. The rafters overhead were studded with handmade nails, where used to hang the flitches of bacon and bunches of dried herbs; the cooking would have to be performed in the fireplace or in the Dutch oven; funny little cupboards were in the corners; and out behind the cottage stretched a God’s half-acre of the prettiest flower-garden ever seen, save the one at Bordentown where lived Abbey’s ladylove.
The rent was ten pounds a year. They jumped at it–and would have taken it just the same had it been twice as much.
An old woman who lived across the street was hired as housekeeper, and straightway our artists threw down their kits and said, like Lincoln, “We have moved.” The beauty and serene peace of middle England is passing words. No wonder the young artists could not paint for several weeks–they just drank it in.