foolish enough now, when one shot from a howitzer would probably make such a breach in their broad-bastioned walls as an army might pass through. Romance has been here, too, for the great forest of Arden, sacred to the memory of Shakespeare's sweetest heroine, stretched as far as to the fringe of Birmingham, where now there is another and much greater forest—the forest of innumerable tall chimneys from the great factories of the smiths, engineers and glass-blowers who have done so much to make man's life on the earth human and clean. They are doing other and deadlier work now, and as one drives up in the darkness towards Coventry and the vast amphitheatre of the great capital of the Midlands, and sees the wide glare with which it lights up the night sky, like a fiery buckle in the blazing belt of England, visible, one thinks, from the middle of the North Sea, and bidding defiance to Zeppelins, one remembers that tens of thousands of women are working here also. They love the theatre and the
