Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/892

830 to demand the well and its 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 five hundred years ago, or as Blake and Stothard saw it four hundred years after Chaucer. I myself always preferred Stothard's vision of those pious folk to Blake's; but that is a matter of taste. Both visions of them were like, and they both now did their best to re-people 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. But 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 always 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 those built-in Roman brick, on those 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 the Roman remains are of the latest years of the Roman 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 barrows of heavily sodded earth made in scooping out the bed of the moat, and building upon some imaginable inner structure of stone or brickwork. 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. The place 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.

The effect was what forts and fields of fight always come to if you give them time enough; though few of the most famous can offer the traveller such a view of Folkestone and the sea as Cæsar's camp. We drove round into the town by a different road from that we came out by, and on the way I noted that there was a small brickmaking industry in the suburb, which could perhaps account both for the prosperity of Folkestone and for the overbuilding. Sadly we saw the great numbers of houses that were to be let or sold, everywhere, and the well-wisher of the sympathetic town must fall back for comfort as to its future on the prevalence of what has been waiting to call itself the instructional industry. Schools for youth of both sexes abound, and one everywhere sees at the proper hours discreetly guarded processions of fresh-looking young English-looking girls, carrying their complexions out into the health-giving air of the Leas. As long as one could see them in their wholesome pink-cheeked blue-eyed innocence, one could hardly miss the fashion whose absence was a condition of one's being in Folkestone out of season.