Page:Weird Tales Volume 13 Number 3 (1929-03).djvu/39

"At last the Mecca of our pilgrimage is in sight!"

Wilmer Denton paused in the middle of Henley Street, that Old World thoroughfare that slants across the center of the little town of Stratford-on-Avon, and waved his hand dramatically toward a house on the opposite side of the way. Long, low, its time-mellowed walls crossed with those massive beams of timber which form so picturesque a feature of houses built in the Sixteenth Century; with its three-gabled roof and quaint pent-house over the door, it was the most famous, most photographed, and most venerated private dwelling in Europe—the birthplace of William Shakespeare.

"Doesn't it just thrill you, boys," Wilmer went on, "to think that you are standing within a few yards of the very spot where the foremost poet of his day—'the sweet Swan of Avon'—'mellifluous-tongued Shakespeare'—'the Wonder of the Ages'—first saw the light?"

I should explain that Wilmer is an actor, and sometimes his private utterances are likely to be more than a little tinged with his professional art. After he had rolled out the measured periods of his eulogy, he glanced at Dick Kinnaird and me as though expecting a round of applause. But neither of us felt in the humor to go into ecstasies just then.

"If you will pardon my breaking in upon your meditations with vulgar, mundane matters," I said gently, "I should like to remind you that it is past 10 o'clock; that the night promises to be cold as well as wet; and that we have failed so far in our efforts to obtain accommodation for the night. It may possibly have escaped your memory that we have already applied at most of the hotels in the town, only