Certain delightful English towns, with glimpses of the pleasant country between

by William Dean Howells

GORGE OF THE AVON, WITH ST. VINCENT’S ROCKS

hills to hide his shame, lest the cliffs that beetle dizzyingly above him should only too complaisantly comply. But he promises himself, if he gets back to Bath alive, to use the first available moment for taking a reef in his national vanity where it has flapped widest. Of course it will not do in Bath to wound the local susceptibilities by dwelling upon the surviving attractions of Clifton as a watering-place, but he may safely and modestly compare them with those of Saratoga.

VI
BY WAY OF SOUTHAMPTON TO LONDON

WE left Bath on the afternoon of a day which remained behind us in doubt whether it was sunny or rainy; but probably the night solved its doubt in favor of rain. It was the next to the last day of March, and thoughtful friends had warned us to be very careful not to travel during the impending Bank holidays, which would be worse than usual (all Bank holidays being bad for polite travellers), because they would also be Easter holidays. We were very willing to heed this counsel, but for one reason or another we were travelling pretty well all through those Easter Bank holidays, and except for a little difficulty in finding places in the train up from Southampton to London, we travelled without the slightest molestation from the holiday-makers. The truth is that the leisure classes in England are so coddled by the constitution and the by-laws that they love to lament over the slightest menace of discomfort or displeasure, and they go about with bated breath warning one another of troubles that never come.

Special trains are run on all lines at Bank holiday times, and very particularly special trains were advertised for those Easter Bank holidays in the station at Bath, but as we were taking a train for Southampton on the Saturday before the dread Monday which was to begin them, we seemed to have it pretty much to ourselves. The Midland road does not run second-class cars, and so you must go first or third, and we being as yet too proud to go third, sought a first-class non-smoking compartment. The most eligible car we could find was distinctly lettered “Smoking,” but the porter said he could paste that out, and by this simple device he changed it to non-smoking, and we took possession.

We were soon running through that English country which is always pretty, and seems prettiest wherever you happen to be, and though we did not and never can forget Bath, we could not help tricking our beams a little, in response to the fields smiling through the sunny rain, or the rainy sun. It was mostly meadowland, with the brown leafless hedges dividing pasture from pasture, but by-and-by there began to be ploughed fields, with more signs of habitation. Yet it was as lonely as it was lovely, like all the English country, to which the cheerfulness of our smaller holdings is wanting. What made it homelike, in spite of the solitude, was the occurrence in greater and greater number of wooden buildings. We conjectured stone villages somewhere out of sight, huddled about their hoary churches, but largely the gray masonry of the West of England had yielded to the gray weather-boarding of the more southeasterly region, where at first only the barns and out-buildings were of wood; but soon the dwellings themselves were frame-built.

Was it at otherwise immemorable Shapton we got tea, running into the cleanly, friendly station from the slopes of the shallow valleys? It must have been, for after that the sky cleared, and nature in a cooler air was gayer, as only tea can make nature. They trundled a little cart up to the side of the train, and gave us our cups and sandwiches, bidding us leave the cups in the train, as they do all over England, to be collected at some or any other station. After that we were in plain sight of the towers and spires of Salisbury, the nearest we ever came, in spite of much expectation and resolution, to the famous cathedral; and then we were in the dear, open country again, with white birches, like those of New England, growing on the railroad banks; and presently again we were in sight of houses building, and houses of pink brick already built, and then, almost without realizing it, we were in the suburbs of Southampton, and driving in a four-wheeler up through the almost American ugliness of the main business street, and out into a residence quarter to the residential hotel commended to us.