He had lived in his native village twenty-six years, or about that.

He died celebrated (if you believe everything you read in the books).

Yet when he died nobody there or elsewhere took any notice of it; and for sixty years afterward no townsman remembered to say anything about him or about his life in Stratford.

When the inquirer came at last he got but one fact--no, _legend_--and got that one at second hand, from a person who had only heard it as a rumor, and didn't claim copyright in it as a production of his own.

He couldn't, very well, for its date antedated his own birth-date.