FOLKESTONE HARBOUR.
That sainted princess, Eanswythe, daughter of the Kentish King Eadbald, is said to be buried within the church. She was one of the most remarkable of the many wondrous saints of her period, and performed the impossible and brought about the incredible with the best of them. She brought water from Cheriton to Folkestone, making it run up hill, and incompetent carpenters who had sawn beams too short had but to invoke her for them (the beams, not the carpenters) to be instantly lengthened to any extent desired. Monks, too, it was said, whose cassocks had been washed, and shrunk in the process, could always get them unshrunk in the same marvellous way; but this must be an error of the most flagrant kind, for we know that those holy men washed themselves little, and their clothes never. But whatever marvellous things she could do, she was not capable of the comparatively simple feat of preventing her original conventual church being washed away by the sea.
Folkestone people were of old very largely the butt of the neighbouring towns. They were said to be stupid beyond the ordinary. Twitted on some occasion that has escaped the present historian with not being able to celebrate a given event in poetry, the town produced a poet eager to disprove the accusation. To show what he could do in that way, he took as his theme a notable capture that Folkestone had just then made, and wrote:
A whale came down the Channel;
The Dover men could not catch it,
But the Folkestoners did.
He was, it will be conceded, not even so near an approach to a poet as that mayor who read an address to Queen Elizabeth, beginning with,
"Most Gracious Queen,
Welcome to Folkesteen."
to which Her Majesty is said to have replied,
"You great fool,
Get off that stool!"
But doubtless these be all malicious inventions. Certainly, though, "great Eliza" did visit Folkestone, and we can have no doubt that the usual address was read—can even see and hear in imagination that mayor reading abysmal ineptitudes "um-um-er-er," like some blundering bumble-bee, the atmosphere growing thick and drowsy with falsities, platitudes, and infinite bombast, until that virginal but vinegary monarch cuts him rudely short. We can see—O! most clear-sighted that we are!—that tall and angular spinster, sharp-visaged, with high, beak-like nose, greatly resembling a gaunt hen—but a very game hen—actually cutting short that turbid flow of mayoral eloquence! we wonder she does not peck him.