Wall, the next mornin’ we sot out bright and early for Shottery, Josiah feelin’ as peart as you please, and the two children’s faces lookin’ like roses. Al Faizi’s eyes wuz bent on the biggest and sweetest rose, as you may say, with a worshippin’ look, that nobody noticed but she who wuz once Smith.
We found the cottage a long, low buildin’, lookin’ as old as the hills, though, like ’em, there didn’t seem to be no signs of fallin’ down and decayin’.
They say it is in jest the condition it wuz when gentle Anne Hathaway lived here, and drawed William over here so often by the strong magnetism of love.
The walls wuz kinder criss-crossed, lookin’ some like Shakespeare’s cottage, and the ruff wuz kinder histed up in places, down towards the eaves, into gabriel ends. And some birds wuz playin’ and wheelin’ round the chimblys. They might have been to all appearance the very same birds that sang round the latticed winders of Anne’s room, and waked her up on summer mornin’s, a-sayin’ to her, as they wheeled round and round it, in the rosy dawn—
“Will is coming to-day to see you! Will loves you! Will loves you!”
I presoom the birds wuz relations to them very ones—grandchildren, “removed” a great number of times.
If birds keep a family tree and plume themselves on their ancestors (and trees and plumes comes nateral to ’em), I presoom they talk this over amongst themselves; mebby that wuz jest what they wuz a-talkin’ about that day, a-twitterin’ about legends a-flyin’ down from the past—
How the happy, eager-faced lover ust to come to see their pretty Anne, and how her heart wuz won, and she went out of the old house a happy bride with the man of her heart, who wuz not an illustrious man to her at all, but only Will, Will Shakespeare, the man she loved, and who loved her.
How they did chirp and talk sunthin’ over! I d’no what it wuz.
Inside wuz some old-fashioned furniture, amongst the rest a bed that ust to belong to Miss Shakespeare, she that wuz Anne Hathaway. Mebby it wuz the same bedstead that her pardner left her in his will.