(If the Swan of Avon were living today and writing for a newspaper syndicate.)

How beautiful is spring! Especially spring here at home in Stratford-on-Avon. Spring, as someone has said, is the birth of the year. I have been working hard in London on some new plays for the Globe Theatre, and I just ran down to Stratford for a few days to see my father and the old friends here in the home town. Oh, if you young people who have stage ambitions will only remember to love your home town wherever it may be, and go back to it once in a while, you will spare yourself contact with so many of the temptations which beset those who rub elbows with the great world without.

I remember when we were rehearsing "Hamlet" up in London, a poor little fellow came to me and applied for the part of Second Grave Digger. He was very much discouraged at the way things were going, and he wished the part of Second Grave Digger so he could lie down and pull the grave in after him. By degrees, I got his story from him, and the great outstanding fact about it was that he had neglected to visit, every so often, his home town. Indeed, he couldn't remember where his home town was located, so I made him one out of scenery, and hung a sign on it, as we do at the Globe, a sign reading. "This is your home town." And he went there and reformed, and was perfectly happy.

My father, when I told him the circumstances, said: "Oh Bill, isn't it lovely here at Stratford in the spring, with the trees all greening, the flowers peering forth under the old dry leaves in the woods and the river Avon tuning up for its song of summer. Bill, what do you say to strolling down to the Red Lion and splitting a bucket of sack?"

(Tomorrow I shall tell you how I got a horse for Richard the Third, if the make-up man doesn't leave it out.) --Leslie's Weekly.