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. I 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.

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

which one buys in all places is for the retrospective enjoyment and identification of their objects of interest, and my "Canterbury Official Guide to the Cathedral Church, and Hand-book of the City," could do no more than agreeably supplement, long afterwards, the prompt information of the indefatigable German.

The day which chose us for our run up from Folkestone was a heavenly fourth of May, when the flowers had pretty well all come up to reassure the birds of spring. There were not only cowslips and primroses in their convertible yellow, but violets visible if not recognizable along the railway sides, and the cherry-trees which so abound in Kent were putting on their clouds of bridal white and standing in festive array between the expanses of the hop-fields, in a sort of shining expectation. At first you think there cannot be more of anything than of the cherry-trees in Kent, which last so long in their beauteous bloom, that for week after week you will find them full-flower, with scarcely a fallen petal. But by-and-by you perceive that there are more hop-vines than even cherry-trees in Kent; and that trained first to climb their slender poles, and then to feel their way along the wires crossing everywhere from the tops of these till the whole landscape is netted in, they are there in an insurpassable plenitude. As yet, on our fourth of May, however, the hops, in mere hint of their ultimate prevalence, were just out of the ground, and beginning to curl about their poles, while the cherry-trees were there as if drifted by a blizzard of bloom. Here and there a pear-tree trained against a sunny wall attempted a rivalry self-doomed to failure; but the yellow furze gilded the embankments and the backward-flying plain with its honied flowers, already neighbored by purple expanses of wild hyacinth.

What, in the heart of all this blossoming, was the great cathedral itself, when we came in sight of it, but a vast efflorescence of the age of faith, mystically beautiful in form, and gray as some pale exhalation from the mould of the ever-cloistered, the deeply reforested past?

Canterbury Cathedral, however, though it is so distinctive, and is the chief of the sacred edifices which have in all Christian times incomparably enriched the place, might be lost from it and be less missed than from any other town of cathedral dignity. Without it Canterbury would still be worthy of all wonder, but with it, what shall one say? There is St. Martin's, there is St. Mildred's, there is St. Alphege's, there is the Monastery of St. Augustine, there is St. Stephen's, there is St. John's Hospital, and I know not what other pious edifices to remember the Roman and Saxon and Norman and English men, who, if they did not build better than they knew, built beautifuler than we can. But of course the cathedral towers above them all in the sky and thought, and I hope no reader of mine will make our mistake of immuring himself in a general omnibus for the rather long drive to the sacred fane from the station. A fly fully open to the sun, and creeping as slowly as a fly can when hired by the hour, is the true means of arrival in the sacred vicinity. In this you may absorb every particular of the picturesque course over the winding road, across the bridge under which the Stour rushes (one marvels whither, in such haste), overhung with the wheels of busy mills and the balconies of idle dwellings, in air reeking of tanneries, and so into the city by streets narrowing and widening at their own caprice, with little regard to the convenience of the shops. These seem rather to thicken about