AN OCTOBER ABROAD 209 



house, you are the master, and you have only to 

 enjoy your own. 



In the gray, misty afternoon, I walked out over 

 the Avon, like all English streams full to its grassy 

 brim, and its current betrayed only by a floating 

 leaf or feather, and along English fields and roads, 

 and noted the familiar sights and sounds and smells 

 of autumn. The spire of the church where Shake- 

 speare lies buried shot up stately and tall from the 

 banks of the Avon, a little removed from the vil- 

 lage; and the church itself, more like a cathedral 

 in size and beauty, was also visible above the trees. 

 Thitherward I soon bent my steps, and while I was 

 lingering among the graves, ^ reading the names and 

 dates so many centuries old, and surveying the gray 

 and weather-worn exterior of the church, the slow 

 tolling of the bell announced a funeral. Upon such 

 a stage, and amid such surroundings, with all this 

 past for a background, the shadowy figure of the 

 peerless bard towering over all, the incident of the 

 moment had a strange interest to me, and I looked 

 about for the funeral cortege. Presently a group of 

 three or four figures appeared at the head of the 

 avenue of limes, the foremost of them a woman, 

 bearing an infant's coffin under her arm, wrapped 

 in a white sheet. The clerk and sexton, with their 

 robes on, went out to meet them, and conducted 

 them into the church, where the service proper to 



1 In England the chnrch always stands in the midst of the 

 graveyard, and hence can be approached only on foot. People, 

 it seems, never go to church in carriages or wagons, but on foot, 

 along paths and lanes. 



