Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/886

824 and then steps ashore to hold it fast, while the others empty a squirming and flopping 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 then 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 boast, to work up the inaudible bidders to flights of speculative fancy; 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. The day of my visit, a few tourists, mostly women, of course, formed the uninterested audience.

The affair was so far from having the interest promised that I turned from it toward the neighboring streets of humble old-fashioned houses, and wondered in which of them it could have been that forty-three years ago a very homesick, very young American going out to be a Consul in Italy, stopped one particularly black night and had a rasher of bacon. 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 toward Dover into misty heights of very agreeable grandeur. In the narrow street that climbs into the upper and newer town, there are old 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 scarcely 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