Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/891

Rh gray in the background of the picture, and beyond the potential goriness of the tented field was a sheep-pasture, full of the white innocence of the young lambs, which, after probably 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 these emblems of their inherited faith could hardly have been less conscious of the monstrous grotesqueness of their trade of murder than the poor soldiers 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. 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 have the foreigner so much with us that we miss him when we come to England. When I take my walks 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 all but 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 nearly 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 those 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-Bowe, the Danes their Scandinavian, the Saxons their Low German, and the Italians their vernacular Latin, the supposed sister tongue and not mother tongue of their modern parlance. If it was not the Latin which Caesar wrote, 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, though not the accents, of all 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 Algonquian 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 nineteenth. We may get back to a likeness of the Latin which the hills back of Folkestone reechoed 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 in sparing his panting and perspiring horse; and the walk gave us a better chance of enjoying the entrancing prospects 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 seasick 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