We had not the strength, social or moral, which their faded gentility represented, to resist the pull of the capital, and in a few days, shrivelled each to less than its twenty-four hours by the chill spring air, we yielded, and started for London on the maddest, merriest afternoon of all the glad Bank holidays of that Easter time. They have apparently not so much leisure for good manners at Southampton as at Bath, or even at Plymouth; the booking-clerk at the station met inquiries about trains as snubbingly as any ticket-seller of our own could have done, and so we chanced it with one of the many expresses, on first-class tickets that at any other time would have insured us a whole compartment. As it was they got us two seats more luxurious than money could buy in an American train, and we were fain to be content. We were the more content, because, presently, we were running through a forest greater than I can remember as in these latter days bordering any American railroad. Miles and miles of country were thickly wooded on either side, with only such cart-tracks and signs of woodcraft as make the page of Thomas Hardy so wild and primitive after twenty centuries of Briton, Roman, Saxon, Dane, and Norman, in that often mastered but never wholly tamed England. We came now and then to a wooden farm-house with its wooden barns and outhouses, in an image of home which we would not have had more like if we could: we had not come to England to be back in America. Yet such is the perversity of human nature, that I who here am always idealizing a stone house as the fittest habitation of man, and longing to live in one, exulted in these frame cottages, and would have preferred one for my English dwelling; even the wood-built stations we whisked by had a charm because they were like the clapboarded

depots, freight and passenger, at our rustic junctions. Everywhere in England one sees building of wood to an amazing extent, though the lumber for it is not cut from English woods, but comes rather from Norway and elsewhere in the densely timbered north. Of course it did not characterize the landscape even in the region of the New Forest, which but for its name we should think so old, but the gray stone of the West-of-England farmsteads and cottages had more and more given way to the warm red brick of the easterly south. This, as we drew near London, paled to the Milwaukee yellow, here and there, and when this color prevailed it was smirched and smutted with the smoke holding the metropolis hidden from us till we could, little by little, bear its immensity.

VII

IN FOLKESTONE OUT OF SEASON

OW long the pretty town, or summer city, of Folke

HOW

stone on the southeastern shore of Kent has been a favorite English watering-place, I am not ready to say; but I think probably a great while. Very likely the ancient Britons did not resort to it much; but there are the remains of Roman fortifications on the downs behind the town, known as Cæsar's camp, and though Cæsar is now said not to have known of camping there, other Roman soldiers there must have been, who could have come down from the place to the sea for a dip as often as they got liberty. It is also imaginable that an occasional Saxon or Dane, after a hard day's marauding along the coast, may have wished to wash up in the waters of the Channel; but they could hardly have inaugurated the sort of season which for five or six weeks of the later summer finds the Folkestone beaches thronged with visitors, and the surf full of them. We ourselves formed no part of the season, having come for the air in the later spring, when the air is said to be tonic enough without the water. It is my belief that at no time of the year can you come amiss to Folkestone; but still it is better to own at the outset that you will not find it very gay there if you come at the end of April.

We thought we were doing a very original if not a

very distinguished thing in putting our hand-baggage into a fly at the station, and then driving with it from house to house for an hour and more in search of lodgings. But the very first people whom we told said they had done the same, and I dare say it is the common experience at Folkestone, where, even out of season, the houses whose addresses you have seem to be full-up, as the lodging-house phrase is, and where although every other house in the place has the sign of "Apartments" in the transoms, or the drawing-room windows, or both, you have the greatest difficulty in fixing yourself. When one address after another failed us, the driver of our fly began to take pity on us: too great pity for our faith, for we began to suspect him of carrying us to apartments in which he was interested; but we were never able to prove it, and by severely opposing him, we flattered ourselves that we did not finally go where he wanted. Perhaps we did, but if so it was the right place for us. If one landlord had not what we wished, or had nothing, he cheerfully referred us to another, and when we had seen the lodgings we decided were the best, we did not and could not make up our minds to take them until we tried yet one more, where we found the landlord full-up, but where he commended us to the house we had just left as one of singular merit, in every way, and with a repute for excellent cooking which we would find the facts justify. We drove back all the more strenuously because of a fancied reluctance in our driver, and found the landlord serenely expectant on the pleasant lawn beside his house; he accepted our repentant excuses, and in another minute we found ourselves in the spacious sittingroom which had become ours, overlooking the brickwalled gardens of the adjoining houses in the shelter,

which slowly, very slowly, became the shade of a grove of tall, slim, young trees. When a trio of tall, slim, young girls intent upon some out-door sport in an interval of the rain, lounged through this grove, we felt that we could not have made a mistake; when a black cat provided itself for one of the garden walls, our reason was perfectly convinced. Fortune had approved our resolution not to go, except in the greatest extremity, to any sort of boarding-house, or any sort of hotel, private, residential, temperant or inebriant, varying to the type of sea-side caravansary which is common to the whole world, but to cling to an ideal of lodgings such as we had cherished ever since our former sojourn in England, and such as you can realize nowhere else in the world.

Our sitting-room windows did not look out upon the sea, as we had planned, but with those brick walls and their tutelary cat, with these tall, slim, young trees and girls before us, we forgot the sea. As the front of our house was not upon the Leas (so the esplanaded cliffs at Folkestone are called), you could not see the coast of France from it, as you could from the housefronts of the Leas in certain states of the atmosphere. But that sight always means rain, and in Folkestone there is rain enough without seeing the coast of France; and so it was not altogether a disadvantage to be one corner back from the Leas on a street enfilading them from the north. After the tea and bread and butter, which instantly appeared as if the kettle had been boiling for us all the time, we ran out to the Leas, and said we would never go away from Folkestone. How, indeed, could we think of doing such a thing, with that lawny level of interasphalted green stretching eastward into the town that climbed picturesquely up to meet it,