Chapter VI: Part 6

We had not the strength, social or moral, which their faded gentility represented, to resist the pull of the capital, and in a few days, shrivelled each to less than its twenty-four hours by the chill spring air, we yielded, and started for London on the maddest, merriest afternoon of all the glad Bank holidays of that Easter time. They have apparently not so much leisure for good manners at Southampton as at Bath, or even at Plymouth; the booking-clerk at the station met inquiries about trains as snubbingly as any ticket-seller of our own could have done, and so we chanced it with one of the many expresses, on first-class tickets that at any other time would have insured us a whole compartment. As it was they got us two seats more luxurious than money could buy in an American train, and we were fain to be content. We were the more content, because, presently, we were running through a forest greater than I can remember as in these latter days bordering any American railroad. Miles and miles of country were thickly wooded on either side, with only such cart-tracks and signs of woodcraft as make the page of Thomas Hardy so wild and primitive after twenty centuries of Briton, Roman, Saxon, Dane, and Norman, in that often mastered but never wholly tamed England. We came now and then to a wooden farm-house with its wooden barns and outhouses, in an image of home which we would not have had more like if we could: we had not come to England to be back in America. Yet such is the perversity of human nature, that I who here am always idealizing a stone house as the fittest habitation of man, and longing to live in one, exulted in these frame cottages, and would have preferred one for my English dwelling; even the wood-built stations we whisked by had a charm because they were like the clapboarded depots, freight and passenger, at our rustic junctions. Everywhere in England one sees building of wood to an amazing extent, though the lumber for it is not cut from English woods, but comes rather from Norway and elsewhere in the densely timbered north. Of course it did not characterize the landscape even in the region of the New Forest, which but for its name we should think so old, but the gray stone of the West-of-England farmsteads and cottages had more and more given way to the warm red brick of the easterly south. This, as we drew near London, paled to the Milwaukee yellow, here and there, and when this color prevailed it was smirched and smutted with the smoke holding the metropolis hidden from us till we could, little by little, bear its immensity.

VII

IN FOLKESTONE OUT OF SEASON

How long the pretty town, or summer city, of Folkestone on the southeastern shore of Kent has been a favorite English watering-place, I am not ready to say; but I think probably a great while. Very likely the ancient Britons did not resort to it much; but there are the remains of Roman fortifications on the downs behind the town, known as Cæsar’s camp, and though Cæsar is now said not to have known of camping there, other Roman soldiers there must have been, who could have come down from the place to the sea for a dip as often as they got liberty. It is also imaginable that an occasional Saxon or Dane, after a hard day’s marauding along the coast, may have wished to wash up in the waters of the Channel; but they could hardly have inaugurated the sort of season which for five or six weeks of the later summer finds the Folkestone beaches thronged with visitors, and the surf full of them. We ourselves formed no part of the season, having come for the air in the later spring, when the air is said to be tonic enough without the water. It is my belief that at no time of the year can you come amiss to Folkestone; but still it is better to own at the outset that you will not find it very gay there if you come at the end of April.

We thought we were doing a very original if not a very distinguished thing in putting our hand-baggage into a fly at the station, and then driving with it from house to house for an hour and more in search of lodgings. But the very first people whom we told said they had done the same, and I dare say it is the common experience at Folkestone, where, even out of season, the houses whose addresses you have seem to be full-up, as the lodging-house phrase is, and where although every other house in the place has the sign of “Apartments” in the transoms, or the drawing-room windows, or both, you have the greatest difficulty in fixing yourself. When one address after another failed us, the driver of our fly began to take pity on us: too great pity for our faith, for we began to suspect him of carrying us to apartments in which he was interested; but we were never able to prove it, and by severely opposing him, we flattered ourselves that we did not finally go where he wanted. Perhaps we did, but if so it was the right place for us. If one landlord had not what we wished, or had nothing, he cheerfully referred us to another, and when we had seen the lodgings we decided were the best, we did not and could not make up our minds to take them until we tried yet one more, where we found the landlord full-up, but where he commended us to the house we had just left as one of singular merit, in every way, and with a repute for excellent cooking which we would find the facts justify. We drove back all the more strenuously because of a fancied reluctance in our driver, and found the landlord serenely expectant on the pleasant lawn beside his house; he accepted our repentant excuses, and in another minute we found ourselves in the spacious sitting-room which had become ours, overlooking the brick-walled gardens of the adjoining houses in the shelter,

which slowly, very slowly, became the shade of a grove of tall, slim, young trees. When a trio of tall, slim, young girls intent upon some out-door sport in an interval of the rain, lounged through this grove, we felt that we could not have made a mistake; when a black cat provided itself for one of the garden walls, our reason was perfectly convinced. Fortune had approved our resolution not to go, except in the greatest extremity, to any sort of boarding-house, or any sort of hotel, private, residential, temperant or inebriant, varying to the type of sea-side caravansary which is common to the whole world, but to cling to an ideal of lodgings such as we had cherished ever since our former sojourn in England, and such as you can realize nowhere else in the world.

Our sitting-room windows did not look out upon the sea, as we had planned, but with those brick walls and their tutelary cat, with these tall, slim, young trees and girls before us, we forgot the sea. As the front of our house was not upon the Leas (so the esplanaded cliffs at Folkestone are called), you could not see the coast of France from it, as you could from the house-fronts of the Leas in certain states of the atmosphere. But that sight always means rain, and in Folkestone there is rain enough without seeing the coast of France; and so it was not altogether a disadvantage to be one corner back from the Leas on a street enfilading them from the north. After the tea and bread and butter, which instantly appeared as if the kettle had been boiling for us all the time, we ran out to the Leas, and said we would never go away from Folkestone. How, indeed, could we think of doing such a thing, with that lawny level of interasphalted green stretching eastward into the town that climbed picturesquely up to meet it, and westward to the sunset, and dropping by a swift declivity softened in its abruptness by flowery and leafy shrubs? If this were not enough inducement to an eternal stay, there was the provisionally peaceful Channel wrinkled in a friendly smile at the depth below us, and shaded from delicate green to delicate purple away from the long, brown beach on which it amused itself by gently breaking in a snowy surf. In the middle distance was every manner of smaller or larger sail, and in the offing little stubbed steamers smoking along, and here and there an ocean-liner making from an American for a German port; or if it was not an ocean-liner, we will call it so. Certainly there could be no question of the business and pleasure shipping drawn up on the beach, on the best terms with the ranks of bathing-machines patiently waiting the August bathers with the same serene faith in them as the half-fledged trees showed, that end-of-April evening, in the coming of the summer which seemed so doubtful to the human spectator. For the prevailing blandness of the atmosphere had keen little points and edges of cold in it; and vagarious gusts caught and tossed the smoke from the chimney-pots of the pretty town along the sea-level below the Leas, giving away here to the wooded walks, and gaining there upon them. Inspired by the presence of a steel pier half as long as that of Atlantic City, with the same sort of pavilion for entertainments at the end, we tried to fancy that the spring was farther advanced with us at home, but we could only make sure that it would be summer sooner and fiercer. In the mean time, as it was too late for the military band which plays every fine afternoon in a stand on the Leas, the birds were singing in the gardens that border it, very sweetly and richly, and not obliging you at any point to get up and

take your hat off by striking into “God Save the King.” I am not sure what kind of birds they were; but I called them to myself robins of our sort, for upon the whole they sounded like them. Some golden-billed blackbirds I made certain of, and very likely there were larks and finches among them, and nightingales, for what I knew. They all shouted for joy of the pleasant evening, and of the garden trees in which they hid, and which were oftener pleasant, no doubt, than the evening. The gardens where the trees stood spread between handsome mansard-roofed houses of gray stucco, of the same type as those which front flush upon the Leas, and which prevail in all the newer parts of Folkestone; their style dates them of the sixties and seventies of the last century, since when not many houses seem to have been built in Folkestone.

Probably these handsome houses were not meant for the lodgings that they have now so largely if not mostly become. It is said that the polite resident population has receded before the summer-folk who have come in and more and more possessed the place, and to whom the tradesman class has survived to minister. At any rate it is the fate of Folkestone to grow morally and civically more and more like Atlantic City, which somehow persists in offering itself in its wild, wooden ugliness for a contrast as well as a parallel of the English watering-place. Nothing could be more unlike the Leas than the Board Walk; nothing more unlike their picturesque declivity than the flat sands on which the vast hotels and toy cottages of the New Jersey summer-resort are built; nothing more unlike the mild, many-steamered, many-schoonered expanse of the Channel, than the immeasurable, empty horizon, and the long, huge wash of the ocean. Yet, I say, there is a solidarity of gay intent and of like devotion to brief alien pleasures in which I find the two places inseparable in my mind.

If such a thing were possible, I should like to take the promenaders on the Leas whom I saw in April, 1904, and interchange them with the same number of those whom I saw two months before on the Board Walk fighting their way against the northeasterly gale that washed the frozen foam far in under it against the frozen sand. Yes, I should be satisfied if I could only transpose the placid, respectable Bath-chairmen of the Leas, and the joyous darkys who pushed the wheeled wicker-chairs of the Board Walk, and turned first one cheek and then another to the blast, or took it in their shining teeth, as they planted their wide, flat feet, wrapped in carpet, with a rhythmical recklessness on the plank. I should like, if this could be done, to ask the first, “Isn’t this something like Folkestone?” and the last, “Isn’t this like Atlantic City?”

Perhaps it is only the sea that is alike in both, and the centipedal steel piers that bestride it in either. The sea makes the exile at home everywhere, for it washes his native shore and the alien coast with the same tides, and only to-day the moss cast up on the shore at Dover breathed the odor that blows in the face of the stroller on Lynn Beach, or the Long Sands at York, Maine.

We were going by a corner of it to see the landing of the passengers from the Calais boat, and to gloat upon what the misery of their passage had left of them; but before we could reach the deck they had found shelter in their special train for London. It used to be one of the chief amusements of the visitors at Folkestone to witness such dishevelled debarkations at their own

piers, and we had promised ourselves the daily excitement of the spectacle; but the arrival of the boats had been changed so as to coincide with our lunch hour, and we pretended that it would have been indelicate to indulge ourselves with it when really it was merely inconvenient.

There are entertainments of an inoffensive vaudeville sort in the pavilion on the pier, and yet milder attractions in the hall of the Leas Pavilion, which for some abstruse reason is sunk some ten or twelve feet below the surrounding level. The tea was yet milder than the other attractions: than the fair vocalist; than the prestidigitator who made a dozen different kinds of hats out of a square piece of cloth, and personated their historical wearers in them; than the cinematograph; than the lady orchestra which so often played pieces “By Desire” that the programme was almost composed of them. A diversion in the direction of ice-cream was not lavishly fortunate: the ice-cream was a sort of sweetened and extract-flavored snow which was hardly colder than the air outside.

At Folkestone we were early warned against the air of the sea-level, which we would find extremely relaxing, whereas that of the Leas, fifty feet above was extremely bracing. We were not able always to note the difference, but at times we found the air even on the Leas extremely relaxing when the wind was in a certain quarter. Once, in a long, warm rain, I found myself so relaxed in the street back of the Leas, that but for the seasonable support of a garden wall against which I rested, I do not know how I should have found strength to get home. You constantly hear, in England, of the relaxing and bracing effects of places that are so little separated by distance, that you wonder at the variance of their hygienic qualities. But once master the notion and you will be able to detect differences so subtle and so constant that from bench to bench on the Leas at Folkestone you will be sensible of being extremely relaxed and extremely braced, though the benches are not twenty rods apart. The great thing is to forget these differences, and to remember only that the birds are singing, and the sun shining equally for all the benches.

The sun is, of course, the soft English sun, which seems nowise akin to our flaming American star, but is quite probably the centre of the same solar system. The birds are in the wilding shrubs and trees which clothe the front of the cliffs, and in the gardened spaces on the relaxing levels, spreading below to the sands of the sea; and they are in the gardens of the placid, handsome houses which stand detached behind their hedges of thorn or laurel. This is their habit through the whole town, which is superficially vast, and everywhere agreeably and often prettily built. It is overbuilt, in fact, and well towards a thousand houses lie empty, and most of those which are occupied are devoted to lodgings and boarding-houses, while hotels, large and little, abound. There are no manufactures, and except in the season and the preparatory season, there is no work. Folkestone has become very fashionable, but it is no longer the resort of the conservative or the aristocratic, or even the æsthetic. These turn to other air and other conditions, where they may step out-of-doors, or wander informally about the fields or over the sands. A great number of smaller places, more lately opened, along the everywhere beautiful English shore, supply simplicity at a far lower rate than you can buy formality in Folkestone.

But the birds say nothing of all this, especially in the first days of your arrival, when it is only a question whether you shall buy the most beautiful house on the Leas, or whether you shall buy the whole town. Afterwards, your heart is gone to Folkestone, and you do not mind whether you have made a good investment or not. By this time though the Earl of Radnor still owns the earth, you own the sky and sea, for which you pay him no ground rent. Of your sky perhaps the less said the better, but of your sea you could not brag too loudly. Sometimes the sun looks askance at it from the curtains of cloud which he likes to keep drawn, especially when it is out of season, and sometimes the rainy Hyades vex its dimness, but at all times its tender and lovely coloring seems its own, and not a hue lent it from the smiling or frowning welkin. I am speaking of its amiable moods, it has a muddiness all its own, also, when the Hyades have kept at it too long. But on a seasonably pleasant day, such as rather prevails at Folkestone, in or out of season, I do not know a much more agreeable thing than to sit on a bench under the edge of the Leas, and tacitly direct the movements of the fishermen whose sails light up the water wherever it is not darkened by the smokes of those steamers I have spoken of. About noon they begin to make inshore, towards the piers which form the harbor, and then if you will leave your bench, and walk down the long, sloping road from the Leas into the quaint, old seafaring quarter of the town, you can see the fishermen auctioning off their several catches.

Their craft, as they round the end of the breakwater, and come dropping into the wharves, are not as graceful as they looked at sea. In fact, the American eye, trained to the trimmer lines of one shipping in every kind, sees them lumpish and loggish, with bows that can scarcely know themselves from sterns, and with stumpy masts and shapeless sails. But the fishermen themselves are very fine: fair and dark men, but mostly fair, of stalwart build, with sou’westers sloping over powerful shoulders, and the red of their English complexions showing through their professional tan. With the toe of his huge thigh-boot one of them tenderly touches the edge of the wharf, as the boatload of fish swerves up to it, and then steps ashore to hold it fast, while the others empty a squirming and flapping heap on the stones. The heaps are gathered into baskets, and carried to the simple sheds of the market, where the beheading and disembowelling of fish is forever going on, and there being dumped down on the stones again, they are cried off by one of the crew that caught them. I say cried because I suppose that is the technical phrase, but it is too violent. The voice of the auctioneer is slow and low, and his manner diffident and embarrassed; he practises none of the arts of his secondary trade; he does nothing, by joke or brag, to work up the inaudible bidders to flights of speculative frenzy; after a pause, which seems no silenter than the rest of the transaction, he ceases to repeat the bids, and his fish, in the measure of a bushel or so, have gone for a matter of three shillings. A few tourists, mostly women, of course, form the uninterested audience. A few push-cart dealers were there with their vehicles the day of my visit. Some boys were trying to get into mischief and to compromise some innocent, confiding dogs as their accomplices. One vast fish-woman, in a man’s hat, with enormous hips and huge flanks, moved ponderously about, making jokes at the affair, and shaking with bulky laughter.

The affair was so far from having the interest promised, that I turned from it towards the neighboring streets of humble old-fashioned houses, and wondered in which of them it would have been that forty-three years before a very home-sick, very young American, going out to be a consul in Italy, stopped one particularly black midnight and had a rasher of bacon. It seemed to me that I was personally interested in this incident, as if I had been personally a party to it, and it was recalled for my amusement, how a little old man, in a water-side fur cap of the Dickens type, came to the front-door of that humble house, and, by the dim light of the candle he bore, recognized the two companions of the young American, who had made friends with them on the journey from London, where they dwelt, and where they had left all their aspirates except a few which they misplaced. I think they must have been commercial travellers going to Paris upon some business occasion, and used to the transit of the Channel, which was much more dependent then than it is now, in its beginnings and endings, on the state of the tide, so that it was no surprise either for them or for that old man to meet at midnight on his threshold in a negotiation for supper. He set about getting it with what always calls itself, in no very intimate relation to the fact, cheerful alacrity, and at a rather smoky fire in the parlor grate he set the tea-kettle singing, and burned the toast, and broiled the bacon, which he then put sizzling before his guests, famished, but gay and glad of heart. Even the heavy heart of the very homesick, very young American was lifted by the simple cheer; and it seemed to him that while there might have been and doubtless would be better bacon, there actually was none half so good in the world. He had no distinct recollection of the Channel crossing afterwards, and so it must have been good, and he could recall little of the journey to Paris or the sojourn there. Being as proud as he was poor, he travelled second-class incognito, but some sense of an official quality must have transpired from his mysterious reticence, for at Paris when they were taking different trains from the same station, one of those good fellows came to his car-window to shake hands. It was in that dark hour of the civil war when the feeling between England and America was not the affection of these halcyon days, but the good fellow put it in the form of a kindly gibe. “I say,” he mocked, holding the American’s hand, “don’t make it too ’ot to ’old us, down there?” Then he waved his hand and disappeared, smiling out of that darkness of time and space which has swallowed up so many smiling faces.

That darkness had swallowed up the humble Folkestone house, so that it could not be specifically found, but there were plenty of other quaint, antiquated houses, of which one had one’s choice, clinging to the edge of the sea, and the foot of the steep which swells away towards Dover into misty heights of very agreeable grandeur. In the narrow street that climbs into the upper and newer town, there are curiosity shops of a fatal fascination for such as love old silver, which is indeed so abundant in the old curiosity shops of England everywhere as to leave the impression that all the silver presently in use is fire-new. There are other fascinating shops of a more practical sort in that street, which has a cart-track so narrow that scarce the boldest Bath chair could venture it. When it opens at top into the new wide streets you find yourself in the midst of a shopping region of which Folkestone is justly proud, and which is said to suggest to “the finer female sense,” both London and Paris. Perhaps it only suggests a difference from both; but at any rate it is very bright and pleasant, especially when it is not raining; and there are not only French and English modistes but Italian confectioners; one sees many Italian names, and their owners seem rather fond of Folkestone, of which they may mistake the air for that of the Riviera. I wish they would not guard so carefully from the people at the Leas Pavilion the secret of the meridional ice-cream.

* * * * *

This street of shops (which abounds in circulating libraries) soon ceases in a street of the self-respectful houses of the local type, and from the midst of these rises the bulk of the Pleasure Gardens Theatre, to which I addicted myself with my love of the drama without even the small reciprocity which I experience from it at home. In the season, the Pleasure Gardens adjacent are given up to many sorts of gayety, but during our stay there was no merriment madder than the hilarity of a croquet tournament; this, I will own, I had not the heart to go and pay sixpence to see.

But at no season does Folkestone cease to be charming, if not in itself, then out of itself. A line of omnibusses as well as a line of public automobiles runs to the delightful old village of Hythe, which is mainly a single street of low houses, with larger ones, old mansions and new villas on the modest heights back of its sea-level, where the sea is first of all skirted by a horse-car track. The cars of this pass the ruins of certain old martello towers between the sea and the long canal dug at the beginning of the last century as part of the defences against the Napoleonic invasion, apparently in the hope that such of the French as escaped the dangers of the Channel would fall into the canal and be drowned. But the chief object of interest at Hythe, beside the human interest, is the ancient church. It is of the usual mixture of Norman and Gothic characteristic of old English churches, but it has the peculiar merit of a collection of six hundred skulls, which with some cords of the relative bones wellnigh fill the whole crypt. These sad evidences of our common mortality are not æsthetically ordered, as in the Church of the Capuchins at Rome, but are simply corded up and ranged on shelves. The surliest of vergers ventures no fable such as you would be very willing to pay for, and you are left to account for them as you can, by battle, by plague, by the slow accumulation of the dead in unremembered graves long robbed of their tenants. It is hard for you, in the presence of their peculiar detachment, to relate these smiling ground-plans of faces--

“Neither painted, glazed nor framed,”--

to anything at any time like the life you know in yourself, or to suppose that there once passed in these hollow shells, even such poor thoughts as do not quite fill your own skull to bursting.

It is, nevertheless, rather a terrible little place, that crypt, and you come out gladly into the watery sunshine, and stray among the tombs, where you are not daunted by the wide bill-board conspicuously erected near the entrance with the charges of corporation, vicar and sexton for burial in that holy ground, lettered large upon the panel. That is the English outrightness, you say, that is the island honesty, and you try, rather vainly, to match it with a like publication in such a place at home which should do us equal credit. Other

things were very like country graveyards at home, though not those strange, coffin shapes of stones which lie on so many graves in Kent, and keep the funeral fact so strongly before the living. But there were the grass-grown graves; the weather-beaten monuments, the wandering brambles, the ineffectual flowers. Besides, there was the ever present ivy, ever absent with us; and over the Gothic portal of the church was a grotesque, laughing mask, with open mouth, out of which a sparrow flew from her nest somewhere within the wrinkled cheeks. As if that were the signal for it the chimes began to ring in the square, gray church tower, and to fill the listening air with the sweetest, the tenderest tones. The bells of St. Leonard’s at Hythe are famous for their tenderness, their sweetness, and it was no uncommon pathos that flowed from their well-tuned throats, and melted our hearts within us. Doubtless at the same hour of every afternoon the forbidding verger returns to the crypt which he has been showing to people all day at threepence a head, and weeps for the hardness of his manner with emotional tourists. At any rate the bells have made their soft appeal to him every afternoon for the hundred and fifty-eight years since 1748, when a still older tower of the church fell down, and they were put up with the new one.

The church-yard was half surrounded by humble houses of many dates, and we came down by one of these streets to the main thoroughfare of Hythe at the moment two little girls were wildly daring fate at the hands of the local halfwit, who was tottering after them, with his rickety arms and legs flung abroad as he ran, in his laughter at their mocking. It was a scene proper to village life anywhere, but what made us localize it in the American villages we knew was coming suddenly on the low wooden cottage which stood flush upon the sidewalk, exactly in the way of wooden houses of exactly the same pattern, familiar to our summer sojourn in many New England towns. It might have stood, just as it was, except for its mouldering and mossgrown tile-roof, on any back street of Marblehead, or Newburyport, or Portsmouth, New Hampshire; yet it seemed there in Hythe by equal authority with any of the new or old brick cottages. There are in fact many wooden houses, both old and new, in Hythe and Sandgate, and other sea-shore and inland towns of the Folkestone region; the old ones follow the older American fashion in their size and shape, and the newer ones the less old; for there are summer cottages of wood in the style that has ultimately prevailed with us. Many by the sea emulate the æsthetic forms of these, but in brick, and only look like our summer cottages at a distance. The real wooden houses when not very ancient, are like those we used to build when we were emerging from the Swiss chalet and Gothic villa period, and the jig-saw still lent its graceful touch in the decoration of gable and veranda; and they are always painted white.

In all cases they either look American or make our houses of the like pattern look English in the retrospect. On the line of the South Eastern Railway in Kent are many wooden stations of exactly the sort I remember on the Fitchburg Railroad in Massachusetts. They could have been transposed without disturbing their consciousness; but what of the porter at one of the Kentish stations whom I heard calling the trains with the same nasal accent that I used to hear announcing my arrival at n’Atholl, and n’Orange, Massachusetts? Was he a belated Yankee ancestor, or was the brakeman of those prehistoric days simply his far progenitor? Is there then nothing American, nothing English, and are we really all one?

In the window of the little pastry shop at Hythe where we got some excellent tea, there were certain objects on a lavish platter whose identity we scarcely ventured to establish, but “What are these?” we finally asked.

“_Doughnuts_,” the reply came, and we could not gasp out the question:

“But where are the baked beans, the fish-balls?”

We might well have expected them to rise like an exhalation from the floor, and greet us with the solemn declaration, “We are no more American than you are, with your English language, which you go round with here disappointing people by not speaking it through your nose. We and you are of the same immemorial Anglo-Saxon tradition; we are at home on either shore of the sea; and we shall attest the unity of the race’s civilization in all the ages to come.”

This would have been a good deal for the baked beans and the fish-balls to say, but it would not have been too much. In that very village of Hythe, where we lunched the Sunday after in a sea-side cottage of such an endearingly American interior that we could not help risking praise of it for that reason, there was a dish which I thought I knew as I voraciously ate of it. I asked its honored name, and I was told, “Salt haddock and potatoes,” but all the same I knew that it was inchoate fish-balls, and I believe they had left the baked beans in the kitchen as more than my daunted intelligence could assimilate at one meal. The baked beans! What know I? The succotash, the chowder, the clam-fritters, the hoe-cake, the flapjacks, the corned-beef hash, the stewed oyster, with whatever else the ancient Briton ate--

“When wild in the woods the noble savage ran,”

and felt his digestion affected by a weird prescience of his transatlantic posterity.

They do not serve hot tamales on the Leas of Folkestone yet, and perhaps they never will, now that our national fickleness has relegated to a hopeless back-numbership the hot-tamale-man, in his suit of shining white with his oven of shining brass, and impoverished our streets of their joint picturesqueness. It is possible that in the season they serve other sorts of public food on the Leas, but I doubt it, for the note of Folkestone is distinctly formality. I do not say the highest fashion, for I have been told that this is “the tender grace of a day that is dead” for Folkestone. The highest fashion in England, if not in America, seeks the simplest expression in certain moments; it likes to go to little sea-shore places where it can be informal, when it likes, in dress and amusement, where it can get close to its neglected mother nature, and lie in her lap and smoke its cigarette in her indulgent face. So at least I have heard; I vouch for nothing. Sometimes I have seen the Leas fairly well dotted with promenaders towards evening; sometimes, in a brief interval of sunshine, the lawns pretty fairly spotted with people listening in chairs to the military band. On bad days--and my experience is that out of eighteen days at Folkestone fourteen are too bad for the band to play in the Pavilion, there is a modest string-band in the Shelter. This is a sort of cavern hollowed under the edge of the Leas, where there are chairs within, and without under the veranda eaves, at tuppence each, and where the visitors all sit reading novels, and trying to shut the music from their consciousness. I think it is because they dread so much coming to “God Save the King,” when they will have to get up and stand uncovered. It is not because they hate to uncover to the King, but because they know that then they will have to go away, and there is nothing else for them to do.

Once they could go twice a day to see the Channel boats come in, and the passengers sodden from seasickness, limply lagging ashore. But now they are deprived of this sight by the ill-behavior of the railroad in timing the boats so that they arrive in the middle of lunch and after dark. It is held to have been distinctly a blow to the prosperity of Folkestone, where people now have more leisure than they know what to do with, even when they spend all the time in the dressing and undressing which the height of the season exacts of them. Of course, there is always the bathing, when the water is warm enough. The bathing-machine is not so attractive to the spectator as our bath-house, with the bather tripping or limping down to the sea across the yellow sands; but it serves equally to pass the time and occupy the mind, and for the American onlooker it would have the charm of novelty, when the clumsy structure was driven into the water.

I have said yellow sands in obedience to Shakespeare, but I note again that the beach at Folkestone is reddish-brown. Its sands are coarse, and do not pack smoothly like those of our beaches; at Dover, where they were used in the mortar for building the castle, the warder had to blame them as the cause of the damp coming through the walls and obliging the authorities to paint the old armor to keep it from rusting. But I fancy the sea-sand does not enter into the composition of the stucco on the Folkestone houses, one of which we found so pleasantly habitable. Most of the houses on and near the Leas are larger than the wont of American houses, and the arrangement much more agreeable and sensible than that of our average houses; the hallway opens from a handsome vestibule, and the stairs ascend from the rear of the hall, and turn squarely, as they mount half-way up. But let not the intending exile suppose that their rents are low; with the rates and taxes, which the tenant always pays in England, the rents are fully up to those in towns of corresponding size with us. Provisions are even higher than in our subordinate cities, especially to the westward, and I doubt if people live as cheaply in Folkestone as, say, in Springfield, Massachusetts, or certainly Buffalo.

For the same money, though, they can live more handsomely, for domestic service in England is cheap and abundant and well-ordered. Yet on the other hand, they cannot live so comfortably, nor, so wholesomely. There are no furnaces in these very personable houses; steam-heat is undreamed of, and the grates which are in every room and are not of ignoble size, scarce suffice to keep the mercury above the early sixties of the thermometer’s degrees. If you would have warm hands and feet you must go out-of-doors and walk them warm. It is not a bad plan, and if you can happen on a little sunshine out-of-doors, it is far better than to sit cowering over the grate, which has enough to do in keeping itself warm.

One could easily exaggerate the sense of sunshine at Folkestone, and yet I do not feel that I have got quite enough of it into my picture. It was not much obscured by fog during our stay; but there were clouds that came and went--came more than they went. One night there was absolute fog, which blew in from the sea in drifts showing almost like snow in the electric lamps; and at momently intervals the siren horn at the pier lowed like some unhappy cow, crazed for her wandering calf, and far out from the blind deep, the Boulogne boat bellowed its plaintive response. But there was, at other times, sunshine quite as absolute. Our last Sunday at Folkestone was one of such sunshine, and all the morning long the sky was blue, blue, as I had fancied it could be blue only in America or in Italy. Besides this there remains the sense of much absolute sunshine from our first Sunday morning, when we walked along under the Leas, towards Sandgate, as far as to the Elizabethan castle on the shore. We found it doubly shut because it was Sunday and because it was not yet Whitmonday, until which feast of the church it would not be opened. It is only after much trouble with the almanac that the essentially dissenting American discovers the date of these church feasts which are confidently given in public announcements in England, as clearly fixing this or that day of the month; but we were sure we should not be there after Whitmonday, and we made what we could of the outside of the castle, and did not suffer our exclusion to embitter us. Nothing could have embittered us that Sunday morning as we strolled along that pleasant-way, with the sea on one side and the sea-side cottages on the other, and occasionally pressing between us and the beach. Their presence so close to the water spoke well for the mildness of the winter, and for the winds of all seasons. On any New England coast they would have frozen up and blown away; but here they stood safe among their laurels, with their little vegetable gardens beside them; and the birds, which sang among their budding trees, probably never left off singing the year round except in some extraordinary stress of weather, or when occupied in plucking up the sprouting peas by the roots and eating the seed-peas. To prevent their ravage, and to restrict them to their business of singing, the rows of young peas were netted with a somewhat coarser mesh than that used in New Jersey to exclude the mosquitoes, but whether it was effectual or not, I do not know.

I only know that the sun shone impartially on birds and peas, and upon us as well, so that an overcoat became oppressive, and the climb back to the Leas by the steep hill-side paths impossible. If it had not been for the elders reading newspapers, and the lovers reading one another’s thoughts on all the benches, it might have been managed; but as it was we climbed down after climbing half-way up, and retraced our steps towards Sandgate, where we took a fly for the drive back to Folkestone. Our fly driver (it is not the slang it sounds) said there would be time within the hour we bargained for to go round through the camp at Shorncliff, and we providentially arrived on the parade-ground while the band was still playing to a crowd of the masses who love military music everywhere, and especially hang tranced upon it in England. If I had by me some particularly vivid pots of paint instead of the cold black and white of print, I might give some notion in color of the way the red-coated soldiery flamed out of the intense green of the plain, and how the strong purples and greens and yellows and blues of the listeners’ dresses gave the effect of some gaudy garden all round them; American women say that English women of all classes wear, and can wear, colors in their soft atmosphere that would shriek aloud in our clear, pitiless air. When the band ceased playing, and each soldier had paired off and strolled away with the maid who had been simple-heartedly waiting for him, it was as gigantic tulips and hollyhocks walking.

The camp at Shorncliff is for ten thousand soldiers, I believe of all arms, who are housed in a town of brick and wooden cottages, with streets and lanes of its own; and there many of the officers have their quarters as well as the men. Once these officers’ families lived in Folkestone, and something of its decay is laid to their removal, which was caused by its increasing expensiveness. Probably none of them dwell in the tents, which our drive brought us in sight of beyond the barrack-town, pitched in the middle of a green, green field, and lying like heaps of snow on the verdure. The old church of Cheriton, with a cloud of immemorial associations, rose gray in the background of the picture, and beyond the potential goriness of the tented field a sheep-pasture stretched, full of the bloodless innocence of the young lambs, which after imaginably bounding as to the tabor’s sound from the martial bands, were stretched beside their dams in motionless exhaustion from their play.

It was all very strange, that sunshiny Sunday morning, for the soldiers who lounged near the gate of their camp looked not less kind than the types of harmlessness beyond the hedge, and the emblems of their inherited faith could hardly have been less conscious of the monstrous grotesqueness of their trade of murder than these poor souls themselves. It is all a weary and disheartening puzzle, which the world seems as far as ever from guessing out. It may be that the best way is to give it up, but one thinks of it helplessly in the beauty of this gentle, smiling England, whose history has been written in blood from the earliest records of the heathen time to the latest Christian yesterday, when her battle-fields have merely been transferred beyond seas, but are still English battle-fields.

What strikes the American constantly in England is the homogeneousness of the people. We at home have the foreigner so much with us that we miss him when we come to England. When I take my walks in the mall in Central Park I am likely to hear any other tongue oftener than English, to hear Yiddish, or Russian, or Polish, or Norwegian, or French, or Italian, or Spanish; but when I take my walks on the Leas at Folkestone, scarcely more than an hour from the polyglot continent of Europe, I hear almost nothing but English. Twice, indeed, I heard a few French people speaking together; once I heard a German Jew telling a story of a dog, which he found so funny that he almost burst with laughter; and once again, in the lower town, there came to me from the open door of an eating-house the sound of Italian. But everywhere else was English, and the signs of _Ici on parle Français_ were almost as infrequent in the shops. As we very well know, if we know English history even so little as I do, it used to be very different. Many of these tongues in their earlier modifications used to be heard in and about Folkestone, if not simultaneously, then successively. The Normans came speaking their French of Stratford-atte-Bow, the Saxons their Low German, the Danes their Scandinavian, and the Italians their vernacular Latin, the supposed sister-tongue and not mother-tongue of their common parlance. It was not the Latin which Cæsar wrote, but it was the Latin which Cæsar heard in his camp on the downs back of Folkestone, if that was really his camp and not some later Roman general’s. The words, if not the accents of these foreigners are still heard in the British speech there; the only words which are almost silent in it are those of the first British, who have given their name to the empire of the English; and that seems very strange, and perhaps a little sad. But it cannot be helped; we ourselves have kept very few Algonquin vocables; we ourselves speak the language of the Roman, the Saxon, the Dane, the Norman in the mixture imported from England in the seventeenth century, and adapted to our needs by the newspapers in the twentieth. We may get back to a likeness of the Latin to which the hills behind Folkestone echoed two thousand years ago, if the Italians keep coming in at the present rate, but it is not probable; and I thought it advisable, for the sake of a realizing sense of Italian authority in our civilization to pay a visit to Cæsar’s camp one afternoon of the few when the sun shone. This took us up a road so long and steep that it seemed only a due humanity to get out and join our fly driver (again that apparent slang!) in sparing his panting and perspiring horse; but the walk gave us a better chance of enjoying the entrancing perspectives opening seaward from every break in the downs. Valleys green with soft grass and gray with pasturing sheep dipped in soft slopes to the Folkestone levels; and against the horizon shimmered the Channel, flecked with sail of every type, and stained with the smoke of steamers, including the Folkestone boat full of passengers not, let us hope, so sea-sick as usual.

Part of our errand was to see the Holy Well at which the Canterbury Pilgrims used to turn aside and drink, and to feel that we were going a little way with them. But we were so lost in pity for our horse and joy in the landscape, that we forgot to demand these objects and their associations from our driver till we had remounted to our places, and turned aside on the way to Cæsar’s camp. Then he could only point with his whip to a hollow we had passed unconscious, and say the Holy Well was there.

“But where, where,” we cried, “is the pilgrim road to Canterbury?”

Then he faced about and pointed in another direction to a long, white highway curving out of sight, and there it was, just as Chaucer saw it full of pilgrims seven hundred years ago, or as Blake and Stothard saw it six hundred years after Chaucer. I myself always preferred Stothard’s notion of these pious folk to Blake’s; but that is a matter of taste. Both versions of them were like, and they both now did their best to repeople the empty white highway for us. I do not say they altogether failed; these things are mostly subjective, and it is hard to tell, especially if you want others to believe your report. We were only subordinately concerned with the Canterbury pilgrims; we were mainly in a high Roman mood, and Cæsar’s camp was our goal.

The antiquity of England is always stunning, and it is with the breath pretty well knocked out of your body that you constantly come upon evidences of the Roman occupation, especially in the old, old churches which abound far beyond the fondest fancy of the home-keeping American mind. You can only stand before these walls built of Roman brick, on these bricked-up Roman arches, and gasp out below the verger’s hearing, “Four hundred years! They held Britain four hundred years! Four times as long as we have lived since we broke with her!” But observe, gentle and trusting reader, that these Roman remains are of the latest years of their domination, and very long after they had converted and enslaved the stubbornest of the Britons, while at Cæsar’s camp, if it was his, we stood before the ghosts of the earliest invaders, of those legionaries who were there before Christ was in the world, and who have left no trace of their presence except this fortress-grave.

Very like a grave it was, with huge, long harrows of heavily sodded earth made in scooping out the bed of the moat, and resting upon some imaginable inner structure of stone or brick. They fronted the landward side of a down which seawardly was of too sharp an ascent to need their defence. Rising one above another they formed good resting-places for the transatlantic tourists whom the Roman engineers could hardly have had in mind, and a good playground for some children who were there with their mothers and nurses. A kindly-looking young Englishman had stretched himself out on one of them, and as we approached from below was in the act of lighting his pipe. It was all, after those two thousand years, very peaceable, and there were so many larks singing in the meadow that it seemed as if there must be one of them in every tuft of grass. It was profusely starred over with the small English daisies, which they are not obliged to take up in pots, for the winter here, and which seized the occasion to pass themselves off on me for white clover, till I found them out by their having no odor.