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

by William Dean Howells

“Doughnuts,” the reply came, and we could not gasp out the question:

“But where are the baked beans, the fish-balls?”

We might well have expected them to rise like an exhalation from the floor, and greet us with the solemn declaration, “We are no more American than you are, with your English language, which you go round with here disappointing people by not speaking it through your nose. We and you are of the same immemorial Anglo-Saxon tradition; we are at home on either shore of the sea; and we shall attest the unity of the race’s civilization in all the ages to come.”

This would have been a good deal for the baked beans and the fish-balls to say, but it would not have been too much. In that very village of Hythe, where we lunched the Sunday after in a sea-side cottage of such an endearingly American interior that we could not help risking praise of it for that reason, there was a dish which I thought I knew as I voraciously ate of it. I asked its honored name, and I was told, “Salt haddock and potatoes,” but all the same I knew that it was inchoate fish-balls, and I believe they had left the baked beans in the kitchen as more than my daunted intelligence could assimilate at one meal. The baked beans! What know I? The succotash, the chowder, the clam-fritters, the hoe-cake, the flapjacks, the corned-beef hash, the stewed oyster, with whatever else the ancient Briton ate—

“When wild in the woods the noble savage ran,”

and felt his digestion affected by a weird prescience of his transatlantic posterity.

They do not serve hot tamales on the Leas of Folkestone yet, and perhaps they never will, now that our national fickleness has relegated to a hopeless back-numbership the hot-tamale-man, in his suit of shining white with his oven of shining brass, and impoverished our streets of their joint picturesqueness. It is possible that in the season they serve other sorts of public food on the Leas, but I doubt it, for the note of Folkestone is distinctly formality. I do not say the highest fashion, for I have been told that this is “the tender grace of a day that is dead” for Folkestone. The highest fashion in England, if not in America, seeks the simplest expression in certain moments; it likes to go to little sea-shore places where it can be informal, when it likes, in dress and amusement, where it can get close to its neglected mother nature, and lie in her lap and smoke its cigarette in her indulgent face. So at least I have heard; I vouch for nothing. Sometimes I have seen the Leas fairly well dotted with promenaders towards evening; sometimes, in a brief interval of sunshine, the lawns pretty fairly spotted with people listening in chairs to the military band. On bad days—and my experience is that out of eighteen days at Folkestone fourteen are too bad for the band to play in the Pavilion, there is a modest string-band in the Shelter. This is a sort of cavern hollowed under the edge of the Leas, where there are chairs within, and without under the veranda eaves, at tuppence each, and where the visitors all sit reading novels, and trying to shut the music from their consciousness. I think it is because they dread so much coming to “God Save the King,” when they will have to get up and stand uncovered. It is not because they hate to uncover to the King, but because they know that then they will have to go away, and there is nothing else for them to do.

Once they could go twice a day to see the Channel boats come in, and the passengers sodden from seasickness, limply lagging ashore. But now they are deprived of this sight by the ill-behavior of the railroad in timing the boats so that they arrive in the middle of lunch and after dark. It is held to have been distinctly a blow to the prosperity of Folkestone, where people now have more leisure than they know what to do with, even when they spend all the time in the dressing and undressing which the height of the season exacts of them. Of course, there is always the bathing, when the water is warm enough. The bathing-machine is not so attractive to the spectator as our bath-house, with the bather tripping or limping down to the sea across the yellow sands; but it serves equally to pass the time and occupy the mind, and for the American onlooker it would have the charm of novelty, when the clumsy structure was driven into the water.

I have said yellow sands in obedience to Shakespeare, but I note again that the beach at Folkestone is reddish-brown. Its sands are coarse, and do not pack smoothly like those of our beaches; at Dover, where they were used in the mortar for building the castle, the warder had to blame them as the cause of the damp coming through the walls and obliging the authorities to paint the old armor to keep it from rusting. But I fancy the sea-sand does not enter into the composition of the stucco on the Folkestone houses, one of which we found so pleasantly habitable. Most of the houses on and near the Leas are larger than the wont of American houses, and the arrangement much more agreeable and sensible than that of our average houses; the hallway opens from a handsome vestibule, and the stairs ascend from the rear of the hall, and turn squarely, as they mount half-way up. But let not the intending exile suppose that their rents are low; with the rates and taxes, which the tenant always pays in England, the rents are fully up to those in towns of corresponding size with us. Provisions are even higher than in our subordinate cities, especially to the westward, and I doubt if people live as cheaply in Folkestone as, say, in Springfield, Massachusetts, or certainly Buffalo.

For the same money, though, they can live more handsomely, for domestic service in England is cheap and abundant and well-ordered. Yet on the other hand, they cannot live so comfortably, nor, so wholesomely. There are no furnaces in these very personable houses; steam-heat is undreamed of, and the grates which are in every room and are not of ignoble size, scarce suffice to keep the mercury above the early sixties of the thermometer’s degrees. If you would have warm hands and feet you must go out-of-doors and walk them warm. It is not a bad plan, and if you can happen on a little sunshine out-of-doors, it is far better than to sit cowering over the grate, which has enough to do in keeping itself warm.