to anything at any time like the life you know in yourself, or to suppose that there once passed in these hollow shells, even such poor thoughts as do not quite fill your own skull to bursting.
It is, nevertheless, rather a terrible little place, that crypt, and you come out gladly into the watery sunshine, and stray among the tombs, where you are not daunted by the wide bill-board conspicuously erected near the entrance with the charges of corporation, vicar and sexton for burial in that holy ground, lettered large upon the panel. That is the English outrightness, you say, that is the island honesty, and you try, rather vainly, to match it with a like publication in such a place at home which should do us equal credit. Other
THE ANCIENT CHURCH AT HYTHE
things were very like country graveyards at home, though not those strange, coffin shapes of stones which lie on so many graves in Kent, and keep the funeral fact so strongly before the living. But there were the grass-grown graves; the weather-beaten monuments, the wandering brambles, the ineffectual flowers. Besides, there was the ever present ivy, ever absent with us; and over the Gothic portal of the church was a grotesque, laughing mask, with open mouth, out of which a sparrow flew from her nest somewhere within the wrinkled cheeks. As if that were the signal for it the chimes began to ring in the square, gray church tower, and to fill the listening air with the sweetest, the tenderest tones. The bells of St. Leonard’s at Hythe are famous for their tenderness, their sweetness, and it was no uncommon pathos that flowed from their well-tuned throats, and melted our hearts within us. Doubtless at the same hour of every afternoon the forbidding verger returns to the crypt which he has been showing to people all day at threepence a head, and weeps for the hardness of his manner with emotional tourists. At any rate the bells have made their soft appeal to him every afternoon for the hundred and fifty-eight years since 1748, when a still older tower of the church fell down, and they were put up with the new one.
The church-yard was half surrounded by humble houses of many dates, and we came down by one of these streets to the main thoroughfare of Hythe at the moment two little girls were wildly daring fate at the hands of the local halfwit, who was tottering after them, with his rickety arms and legs flung abroad as he ran, in his laughter at their mocking. It was a scene proper to village life anywhere, but what made us localize it in the American villages we knew was coming suddenly on the low wooden cottage which stood flush upon the sidewalk, exactly in the way of wooden houses of exactly the same pattern, familiar to our summer sojourn in many New England towns. It might have stood, just as it was, except for its mouldering and mossgrown tile-roof, on any back street of Marblehead, or Newburyport, or Portsmouth, New Hampshire; yet it seemed there in Hythe by equal authority with any of the new or old brick cottages. There are in fact many wooden houses, both old and new, in Hythe and Sandgate, and other sea-shore and inland towns of the Folkestone region; the old ones follow the older American fashion in their size and shape, and the newer ones the less old; for there are summer cottages of wood in the style that has ultimately prevailed with us. Many by the sea emulate the æsthetic forms of these, but in brick, and only look like our summer cottages at a distance. The real wooden houses when not very ancient, are like those we used to build when we were emerging from the Swiss chalet and Gothic villa period, and the jig-saw still lent its graceful touch in the decoration of gable and veranda; and they are always painted white.
In all cases they either look American or make our houses of the like pattern look English in the retrospect. On the line of the South Eastern Railway in Kent are many wooden stations of exactly the sort I remember on the Fitchburg Railroad in Massachusetts. They could have been transposed without disturbing their consciousness; but what of the porter at one of the Kentish stations whom I heard calling the trains with the same nasal accent that I used to hear announcing my arrival at n’Atholl, and n’Orange, Massachusetts? Was he a belated Yankee ancestor, or was the brakeman of those prehistoric days simply his far progenitor? Is there then nothing American, nothing English, and are we really all one?
In the window of the little pastry shop at Hythe where we got some excellent tea, there were certain objects on a lavish platter whose identity we scarcely ventured to establish, but “What are these?” we finally asked.