ings at home, and great numbers of young men whom one sees almost as seldom. One lady on the platform, in evening dress, I fancied the wife of the young gentleman in evening dress who was standing (in England candidates do not run) for a neighboring parliamentary constituency, and who presently made an excellent and telling speech. At times the speakers all aimed some remark, usually semijocose, at the women, and there was evidence of the domestication, the homely intelligence of all ranks and sexes, in English politics, which is wholly absent from ours. The points made against the Tories were their selfish government of the nation in the interest of themselves and their families; the crushing debts and taxes heaped upon the English people by the mismanagement of the Boer war; the injustice of the proposed school law towards Dissenters; the absurdity and wickedness of the preferential tariff. It was all very personal to Mr. Chamberlain and Mr. Balfour, but impersonally personal and self-respectful. As I came in the Folkestone candidate was speaking very clearly and cogently, but not very vividly, and the real spirit of the demonstration was not roused till a Liberal member of Parliament followed him in a jovial, witty, and forcible talk rather than a speech. He won the heart of the people, and especially the women, who laughed with him, and helped cheer him; there was some give and take between him and the audience, from which he was bantered as well as applauded; but all was well within the bounds of good-humor and good-manners. He genially roughed the working-men, whom he rallied on not getting everything they wanted, now when they had the vote and could vote what they chose. It was like the talk of a man to his family or his familiar friends, and gave the sense of the

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closely graduated intimacy of politics possible in a homogeneous community.

He was followed by that gentleman in evening dress, who spoke as forcibly, and addressed himself to the working-man, too, whom he invited to realize their power, and to "take their share in the kingship." The terms of his appeal made me tremble a little, but they were probably quite figurative, and embodied no danger to the monarchy. Still from a man in evening dress, and especially a white waistcoat, they were interesting; and I came away equally divided between my surprise at them, and my American misgiving for the fact that neither the gentleman proposing to represent a Folkestone constituency nor any of his friends was a resident of Folkestone. Such a thing, I reflected, was wholly alien to our law and custom, and could not happen except where some gentleman wished very much to be a Senator from a State of which he was not a citizen, and felt obliged to buy up its legislature.

VIII

KENTISH NEIGHBORHOODS, INCLUDING

CANTERBURY

OVER is a place which looks its history as little

DOVER

as any famous town I know. It lies smutched with smoke, along the shore, and it is as commonplace as some worthy town of our own which has grown to like effect in as many decades as Dover has taken centuries. The difference in favor of Dover is that when at last you get outside of it, you are upon the same circle of downs that backs Folkestone, and on the top of one of them you are overawed by the very noble castle, which too few people, who know the place as the landing of the Calais boat, ever think of. Up and steeply up we mounted, with a mounting sense of never getting there; but at last, after passing red-coated soldiers stalking upward, and red-cheeked children stooping downward to pick the wayside flowers, hardily blowing in the keen sea-wind, we reached the ancient fortress and waited in a court-yard till we were many enough to be herded through it by a warder of a jocosity which I have not known elsewhere in England. He had a joke for the mimic men in armor which had to be constantly painted to keep the damp off; for the thickness of the walls; for the lantern that flings a faint glimmer, a third way down the unfathomable castle well; for the disparity between our multitude and

the French father and daughter whom he had shown through just before us. At different points he would begin, "I always say, 'ere," and then pronounce some habitual pleasantry. He called our notice to a crusader effigy's tall two-handed sword, and invited us to enjoy his custom of calling it "is toothpick."

All would not do. We kept sternly or densely silent; so far from laughing, not one of us smiled. In the small chamber which served as the bedroom of Charles I. and Charles II. on their visit to the castle, he showed the narrow alcove where the couch of these kings had once lurked, and then looked around at us and sighed deeply, as for some one to say that it was rather like a coal-cellar. In England, one does not make merry even with by-gone royalty; it is as if the unwritten law which renders it bad form to speak with slight of any member of the reigning family were retroactive, and forbade trifling with the family it has displaced. knew the warder was aching to joke at the expense of that alcove, and I ached in sympathy with him, but we both remained respectfully serious. His herd received all his humorous comment with a dulness, or a heartlessness, I do not know which, such as I have never seen equalled, in so much that, coming out last, I pressed a shy sixpence into his palm with the bated. explanation, "That's for the jokes," and his sad face lighted up with a joy that I hope was for the appreciation and not for the sixpence.

I

We went once to Dover, but many times, as I have recorded, to Hythe, which was once the home of smuggling, and where there is still a little ale-house that poetically, pathetically, remembers the happy past by its sign of "Smuggler's Retreat." It is said that there was formerly smuggling pretty much along the whole

coast, and there is a heartrending story of charred bales of silk, found in a farm-house chimney, long after they were hidden there, where the hearth-fires of many years had done their worst with them. It grieves the spirit still to think of the young hearts which those silks, timely and fitly worn, would have gladdened or captivated. But Hythe could hardly ever, even in the palmiest days of smuggling, have been a haunt of fashion, though the police-station, in the long, rambling street, had apparently once been an assemblyroom, if one might trust the glimpses caught, from the top of one's charabanc, of the interiors of rooms far statelier than suit the simple needs or tastes of modern crime.

I do not know why my thought should linger with special fondness in Hythe, for all the region far and near was alive with equal allurements. Famous and hallowed Canterbury itself was only an hour or so away, and yet we kept going day after day to Hythe for no better reason, perhaps, than that the charabanc ran accessibly by the corner of our lodgings in Folkestone, while it required a special effort of the will to call a fly and drive to the station and thence take the train for a city whose origin, in the local imagination at least, is prehistoric, and was undeniably a capital of the ancient Britons. The generous ignorance in which I finally approached was not so ample as to include association with Chaucer's Pilgrims, or the fact that Canterbury is the seat of the primate of all England; and it distinctly faltered before extending itself to the tragic circumstances of Thomas à Becket's murder. Otherwise it was most comprehensive, and I suppose that few travellers have perused the pages of Baedeker relating to the place with more surprise. The manual

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