They went before luncheon to the river and sailed up and down in a small steam-launch named The Swan of Avon.  Jean thought privately that the presence of such things as steam-launches were a blot on Shakespeare’s river, but the boys were delighted with them, and at once began to plan how one might be got to adorn Tweed.

In the afternoon they walked over the fields to Shottery to see Anne Hathaway’s cottage.

Jean walked in a dream.  On just such an April day, when shepherds pipe on oaten straws, Shakespeare himself must have walked here.  It would be different, of course; there would be no streets of little mean houses, only a few thatched cottages.  But the larks would be singing as they were to-day, and the hawthorn coming out, and the spring flowers abloom in Anne Hathaway’s garden.

She caught her breath as they went out of the sunshine into the dim interior of the cottage.

This ingle-nook ...  Shakespeare must have sat here on winter evenings and talked.  Did he tell Anne Hathaway wonderful tales?  Perhaps, when he was not writing and weaving for himself a garment of immortality, he was just an everyday man, genial with his neighbours, interested in all the small events of his own town, just Master Shakespeare whom the children looked up from their play to smile at as he passed.

“Oh, Jock,” Jean said, clutching her brother’s sleeve.  “Can you really believe that he sat here?—­actually in this little room?  Looked out of the window—­isn’t it wonderful, Jock?”

Jock, like Mr. Fearing, ever wakeful on the enchanted ground, rolled his head uncomfortably, sniffed, and said, “It smells musty!” Both he and Mhor were frankly much more interested in the fact that ginger-beer and biscuits were to be had in the cottage next door.

They mooned about all afternoon vastly content, and had tea in the garden of a sort of enchanted cottage (with a card in the window which bore the legend, “We sell home-made lemonade, lavender, and pot-pourri "), among apple trees and spring flowers and singing birds, and ate home-made bread and honey, and cakes with orange icing on them.  A girl in a blue gown, who might have been Sweet Anne Page, waited on them, and Jean was so distressed at the amount they had eaten and at the smallness of the bill presented that she slipped an extra large tip under a plate, and fled before it could be discovered.

It was a red-letter day for all three, for they were going to the theatre that night for the first time.  Jean had once been at a play with her father, but it was so long ago as to be the dimmest memory, and she was as excited as the boys.  Their first play was to be As You Like It.  Oh, lucky young people to see, for the first time on an April evening, in Shakespeare’s own town, the youngest, gayest play that ever was written!