Gray Days and Gold (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated.1911 Excerpt: ... STRATFORD GLEANINGS. In all England there is not a cleaner, more decorous, or more restful town than Stratford-upon-Avon, and even to look upon it is to receive a suggestion of peace and comfort. The red brick dwellings shine among the trees, the flower-spangled meadows stretch away, in every direction, and the green hills, sprinkled with copse and villa, glimmer through mist, all round the lovely Vale of the Red Horse, --Welcombe in the north, with its conspicuous monuments; Meon in the south, rugged and bold; Red Hill in the west, and far away eastward, beyond a wide, smiling area of farms and villages, the crests of Edgehill, at Radley and Rising Sun, where once the armies of King Charles the First confronted their Roundhead foe. The face of England can wear many expressions, but when propitious it is a face which to see is to love, and nowhere is it more propitious than in stately Warwickshire and around the home of Shakespeare. After repeated visits to Shakespeare's Town the traveller begins to observe more closely than perhaps at first he did its everyday life and its environment. I have rambled through fragrant fields to Clifford church, and strolled through green lanes to romantic Preston, and climbed Borden Hill, and stood by the May-pole on Welford Common, and journeyed along the battle-haunted crest of Edgehill, and rested at venerable Compton-Wynyates, and climbed the hills of Welcombe to peer into the darkening valleys of the Avon and hear the cuckoo-note echoed and re-echoed from rhododendron groves and from the great, mysterious elms that embower the countryside for miles and miles around. This is the everyday life of Stratford, --fertile farms, garnished meadows, avenues of white and coral hawthorn, masses of milky snow-ball, honeysuckle, and .