Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/884



was not an ocean liner it ought to have been.

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 way 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 at home, but we could only make sure that it would be summer sooner and fiercer with us. 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 them; 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 all 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 thrushes among them,—and nightingales, for anything 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 as of the sixties and seventies of the last century, since when not many houses seem to have been built on the Leas at Folkestone.

There are entertainments of an inoffensive vaudeville sort in the pavilion on the pier at Folkestone, and yet milder attractions in the hall of the Leas Pavilion, which for some abstruse reason is sunk ten or twelve feet below the surrounding level. The eve-