Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/888

826 for Folkestone. The highest fashion in England, if not in America, seeks the simplest expression in certain moments; it likes to go to little seashore 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 toward evening; sometimes, in a brief interval of sunshine, the lawns pretty fairly spotted with people listening in chairs to the military band. On other 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 out 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, come 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 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 the bath-house with the bather tripping or hobbling 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, they are to blame for 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 in 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, taking the prevalence of rheumatism into account, so wholesomely. There are no furnaces in these very personable houses; steam heat is undreamt 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 sum 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