A Charming Crime Magical Cures Mystery 1 Tonya

Kappes download

https://ebookbell.com/product/a-charming-crime-magical-cures-
mystery-1-tonya-kappes-53527686

Explore and download more ebooks at ebookbell.com

Here are some recommended products that we believe you will be
interested in. You can click the link to download.

The Body At The Roman Baths A Gripping And Charming Cozy Crime Novel A
Georgina Drake Mystery Book 5 Kate Hardy

https://ebookbell.com/product/the-body-at-the-roman-baths-a-gripping-
and-charming-cozy-crime-novel-a-georgina-drake-mystery-book-5-kate-
hardy-232153498

Praying Mantis The Charming And Ingenious Cosy Crime Mystery Set In A
Hotel In The Himalayas A Harith Athreya Mystery Rv Raman

https://ebookbell.com/product/praying-mantis-the-charming-and-
ingenious-cosy-crime-mystery-set-in-a-hotel-in-the-himalayas-a-harith-
athreya-mystery-rv-raman-50893536

Crime And Social Control In A Changing China Jianhong Liu Lening Zhang

https://ebookbell.com/product/crime-and-social-control-in-a-changing-
china-jianhong-liu-lening-zhang-5596726

Ports Crime And Security Governing And Policing Seaports In A Changing

World Anna Sergi Alexandria Reid Luca Storti Marleen Easton

https://ebookbell.com/product/ports-crime-and-security-governing-and-
policing-seaports-in-a-changing-world-anna-sergi-alexandria-reid-luca-
storti-marleen-easton-51808884
Ports Crime And Security Governing And Policing Seaports In A Changing
World 1st Edition Anna Sergi

https://ebookbell.com/product/ports-crime-and-security-governing-and-
policing-seaports-in-a-changing-world-1st-edition-anna-sergi-34833648

Changing Patterns Of Delinquency And Crime A Longitudinal Study In

Racine Lyle W Shannon

https://ebookbell.com/product/changing-patterns-of-delinquency-and-
crime-a-longitudinal-study-in-racine-lyle-w-shannon-42899522

Green Harms And Crimes Critical Criminology In A Changing World

Ragnhild Aslaug Sollund Eds

https://ebookbell.com/product/green-harms-and-crimes-critical-
criminology-in-a-changing-world-ragnhild-aslaug-sollund-eds-5381288

A Charming Christmas Arrangement Heatherly Bell

https://ebookbell.com/product/a-charming-christmas-arrangement-
heatherly-bell-46438394

A Charming Single Dad Heatherly Bell

https://ebookbell.com/product/a-charming-single-dad-heatherly-
bell-51259290
 Another Random Document on
Scribd Without Any Related Topics
has not only the charm of pleasant houses and gardens, with public parks
and promenades, and schools and colleges, and museums and galleries, as
well as almost a superabundance of attractive hotels, but it is in the midst of
nature as grand as that of the Niagara River below the falls. The Avon’s
currents and tides flow between cliffs, spanned by Brunel’s exquisite and
awful suspension-bridge, that rise thickly and wildly wooded on one side,
and on the other, built over to its stupendous verge with shapes of the
stately and dignified architecture, civic and domestic, which characterizes
English towns. The American invader draws a panting breath of
astonishment in the presence of scenery which eclipses his native landscape
in savage grandeur as much as in civilized loveliness, and meekly wonders,
on his way through that mighty gorge of the Avon, how he could have come
to England with the notion that she was soft and tame in her most
spectacular moods. He does not call upon the

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

W E 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.
It was really very much a private house, for it was mainly formed of a
stately old mansion, which with many modern additions, actual and
prospective, had been turned to the uses of genteel boarding. But it had a
mixed character, and was at moments everything you could ask a hotel to
be; if it failed of wine or spirits, which could not be sold on the premises,
these could be brought in from some neighboring bar. The transients, as our
summer hotels call them, were few, and nearly all the inmates except
ourselves were permanent boarders, in the scriptural and New England
proportion of seven women to one man. It was a heterogeneous company of
insular and colonial English, but always English, whether from the
immediate neighborhood, or Canada, or South Africa, or Australia. At
separate small tables in an older dining-room, cooled by the ancestral grate,
or in a newer one, warmed by steam-radiators just put in, we were served
abundant breakfasts of bacon and eggs and tea and toast, and table d’hôte
luncheons and dinners, with afternoon tea and after-dinner coffee in the
drawing-room. For all this, with rooms and lights and service, we paid ten
shillings a day, and I dare say the permanents paid less. Bedroom fires were
of course extra, but as they gave out no perceptible heat, they ought not to
be counted, though they had a certain illuminating force, say a five candle-
power, and rendered the breath distinctly visible.
We had come down to Southampton in a superstition that, being to the
southward, it would be milder than Bath, where the spring was from time to
time so inclement, but finding it rather colder and bleaker, we experimented
a little farther to the southward, a day or two after our arrival, and went to
the Isle of Wight. The sail across the Solent, or whatever water is was we
crossed, was beautiful, but it was not balmy, and when we reached Cowes,
after that dinner aboard which you always get so much better in England
than in like conditions with us, we found it looking not so tropical as we
could have liked, but doubtless as tropical as it really was. The pretty town
curved round its famous yacht harborage in ranks of summer hotel-like
houses, with green lattices and a convention of out-door life in their
architecture, such as befitted a mild climate; but we were keeping on to the
station where you take train for Ventnor, on the southern shore of the island,
which has to support the reputation of being the English Riviera. We did not
know then how bad the Italian Riviera could be, and doubtless we blamed
the English one more than we ought. We ought, indeed, to have been
warmed for it by the sort of horseback exercise we had on the roughest
stretch of railway I can remember, in cars whose springs had been broken in
earlier service on some mainland line of the monopoly now employing
them on the Isle of Wight, and defying the public to do anything about it, as
successfully as any railroad of our own republic. We had a hope and an
intention of seeing flowers, which we fulfilled as we could with the
unprofitable gayety of the blossomed furze by the waysides; and more and
more we fancied a forwardness in the spring which was doubtless mainly of
our invention. From our steamer we had a glimpse of Osborne Castle, the
favorite seat of the good queen who is gone, and we wafted our thoughts
afar to Carisbrooke, where the hapless Charles I. was for a time captive,
playing fast and loose, in feeble bad faith, with the victorious Parliament,
when it would have been willing to treat with him. But you cannot go
everywhere in England, especially in one day, though home-keeping
Americans think it is so small, and we had to leave Newport and its
Carisbrooke castle aside in our going and coming between Ryde and
Ventnor.
It was well into the afternoon when we reached Ventnor, and took a fly
for the time left us, which was largely tea-time, by the reckoning of the girl
in the nice pastry-shop where we stopped for refreshment. She said that the
season in Ventnor was July and August, but the bathing was good into
October, and we could believe the pleasant Irishman in our return train who
told us that it was terribly hot in the summer at Ventnor. The lovely little
town, which is like an English water-color, for the rich, soft blur of its
grays, and blues and greens, has a sea at its feet of an almost Bermudian
variety of rainbow tints, and a milky horizon all its own, with the sails of
fishing-boats, drowning in it, like moths that had got into the milk. The
streets rise in amphitheatrical terraces from the shore, and where they cease
to have the liveliness of watering-place

THE SOUTH SHORE, SOUTHAMPTON

shops, they have the domesticity of residential hotels and summer boarding-
houses, and private villas set in depths of myrtle and holly and oleander and
laurel; some of the better-looking houses were thatched, perhaps to satisfy a
sentiment for rusticity in the summer boarder or tenant. The intelligent
hunchback who drove our fly, and instructed us in things of local interest
far beyond our capacity, named prices at these houses which might, if I
repeated them, tempt an invasion from our own resorts, if people did not
mind suffering in July and August for the sake of the fine weather in
November. Doubtless there are some who would not mind being shut
southward by the steep and lofty downs which prevent the movement of air
as much in summer as in winter at Ventnor. The acclivities are covered with
a short, wiry grass, and on the day of our visit the boys of Ventnor were
coasting down them on a kind of toboggans. Besides this peculiar
advantage, Ventnor has the attraction, common to so many English towns
and villages, of a Norman church, and of those seats and parks of the
nobility and gentry which one cannot long miss in whatever direction one
goes, in a land where the nobility and gentry are so much cherished.
The day had been hesitating between rain and sun as usual, but it had
decided for rain when we left Ventnor, where we had already found it very
cold in-doors, over the tea and bread and butter, which they gave us so
good. By the time we had got back to Ryde, the frigidity of the railway
waiting-room, all the colder for the fire that had died earlier in the day, was
such that it seemed better to go out and walk up and down the platform, in
the drive of the rain, as hard and fast as one could, than to stay within. In
these conditions the boat appeared to be longer in coming than it really was,
and when it came it was almost too well laden with the Bank-holiday folk
whom we had been instructed to dread. At Cowes, more young men and
young girls of a like sort came on board, but beyond favoring us with their
loud confidences they did us no harm, and it was quite practicable to get
supper. They were of the chorus-girl level of life, apparently, and there was
much that suggested the stage in their looks and behavior, but they could
not all have been of the theatre, and they were better company than the two
German governesses who had travelled towards Ventnor with us, and filled
the compartment with the harsh clashing of their native consonants. The
worst that you could say of the trippers was that they were always leaving
the saloon door open, and letting in the damp wind, which had now become
very bitter, but English people of every degree are always leaving the door
open, and these poor trippers were only like the rest of their nation in that.
One young lady lay with her feet conspicuously up on the lounge which she
occupied to the exclusion of four or five other persons, but by-and-by she
took her feet down, and the most critical traveller could not have affirmed
that it was characteristic of Easter Bank-holiday ladies to stretch themselves
out with their feet permanently up on the cushions. When we landed at
Southampton, and drove away in a cab, we had an experience which was
then novel, but ceased to be less and less so. It seemed that the pier was a
private enterprise, and you must pay toll for its use, or else not arrive or
depart on that boat.
So many of our fellow-countrymen come ashore from their Atlantic
liners at Southampton, and rush up to London in two hours by their steamer
trains, without

“THE PIER WAS A PRIVATE ENTERPRISE”

any other sense of the place than as a port of entry, that I feel as if I were
making an undue claim upon their credulity in proposing it as a city having
a varied literary and historical interest. Yet Southampton is a city of no
mean memories, with a history going back into the dark of the first
invasions, and culminating early in the fable of King Canute’s failure to
browbeat the Atlantic. The men who won Cressy, Poictiers and Agincourt
set sail from it, and fifty ships and more made ready there for the Armada.
In turn it was much harried by the French, but the Dutch, whom Alva drove
into exile, settled in the town and helped prosper it with their industries, till
the Great Plague brought it such adversity that the grass, which has served
the turn of so much desolation, grew in its streets. With the continuous wars
of England and France it rose again, and now it is what every American
traveller fails to see as he hurries through it. I have not thought it needful to
mention that in the ages when giants abounded in Britain, Southampton had
one of the worst of that caitiff race, who was baptized against his will, but
afterwards eloping with his liege lady, was finally slain.
The place was so attractive socially, a hundred-odd years ago, that Jane
Austen’s family, when they came away from Bath, could think of no
pleasanter sojourn. She wrote some of her most delightful letters from
Southampton, and of course we went and looked up the neighborhood
where she had lived. No trace of that precious occupancy is now left beside
the stretch of the ancient city wall from which the Austens’ garden
overlooked a beautiful expanse of the Solent, but we made out the place,
and for the rest we gave ourselves to the pleasure of following the course of
the old city wall, which, with its ivied arches, its towers and battlements all
agreeably mouldering and ruinous, is better, as far as it goes, than the walls
of either Chester or York, conscious of their entirety, and of their claim
upon the interest of travel. Southampton is so very modern in the prosperity
which has made it the rival of Liverpool as the chief port of entry from our
country, that we ought rather to have devoted ourselves to its docks than its
walls, and we did honestly try for them. But there is always something very
disappointing about docks, and though I went more than once for a due
impression of them at Southampton, I constantly failed of it. I tried coming
upon them casually at first; at last I drove expressly to them, and when I
dismounted from my cab, and cast about me for the sensation they should
have imparted, and demanded of my cabman, “Where are the docks?” and
he said, “Here they are, sir,” I could not make them out, and was forced to
conclude that they had been taken in for the time.
I had no such difficulty with the prison into which Dr. Isaac Watts’s
father was put for some of those opinions which in former times were
always costing people their personal liberty. In my mind’s eye I could
almost see his poor wife bringing their babe and suckling the infant
hymnologist under the father’s prison window; and I was in such rich doubt
of Dr. Watts’s birthplace in French Street, that with two houses to choose
from, I ended by uncovering to both. I think it was not too much honor to
that kind, brave soul, who got no little poetry into his piety, and was neither
very severe about theology on earth, nor exigent of psalm-singing in
heaven, where he imagined a pleasing conformity in the conditions to the
tastes and habits of the several saints in this life. If the reader thinks that I
overdid my reverence in the case of this poet, let him set against it my total
failure to visit either the birthplace or the baptismal church of another
Southampton poet, that Charles Dibdin, namely, whose songs were much on
British tongues when Britain was making herself mistress of the seas, and
which possibly breathe still from the lips of

“The sweet little cherub who sits up aloft,

Keeping watch o’er the life of poor Jack.”

Early in my English travels I found it well to leave something to the

curiosity of after-seekers, and there is so much to see in every English city,
town, village, country neighborhood, road, and lane that I could always
leave unseen far more than I saw. I suppose it was largely accidental that I
gave so much of my time to the traces of the Watts family, but perhaps it
was also because both the prison and the house (in which, whichever it was,
the mother kept a boarding-house while she nurtured her nine children, and
the good doctor began his Greek and Latin at five years of age), were in the
region of the old church of St. Michael’s which will form another
compensation at Southampton for the American who misses the docks. Its
architecture was amongst my earliest Norman, and was of the earliest
Norman of any, for the church was built in 1100 by monks who came over
from Normandy. It was duly burned by the French two centuries later in one
of their pretty constant incursions; they burned only the nave of the church,
but they left the baptismal font rather badly cracked, and with only the
staple of the lock which used to fasten the lid to keep the water from being
stolen. I do not know why the baptismal water should have been stolen, but
perhaps in those ages of faith it was a specific against some popular malady,
leprosy or the black death, or the like. The sacristan who showed me the
font, showed me also the tomb of a bad baronet of the past, a very great
miscreant, whose name he could not remember, but who had done
something awful to his wives; and no doubt he could easily have told me
why people stole the water. He was himself an excellent family man, or at
least highly domesticated, if one might judge from his manner with his own
wife, who came in demanding a certain key of him. Husband-like, he
denied having it; then he remembered, and said, “Oh, I left it in the pocket
of my black coat.” He was not at all vexed at being interrupted in telling me
about the bad baronet, whose tomb, he made me observe, had not a leaf or
blossom on it, though it was Easter Sunday, and the old church, which was
beautifully rough and simple within, was decked with flowers for the
festival.
Outside, the prevalence of Easter was so great that we had failed of a
street cab, and had been obliged to send to the mews (so much better than a
livery-stable, though probably not provided now with falcons) for a fly, and
we felt by no means sure that we should be admitted to the beautiful old
Tudor house, facing the church of St. Michael’s, which goes by the name of
King Henry VIII.’s Palace. They are much stricter in England concerning
the holy days of the church than the non-conforming American imagines.
On Good Friday there were neither cabs nor trams at Southampton in the
morning, and only Sunday trains were run on the Great Southwestern to
London; though on the other hand the shops were open, and mechanics
were working; perhaps they closed and stopped in the afternoon. But we
summoned an unchurchly courage for the Tudor house, and when we rang
at the postern-gate—it ought to have been a postern-gate, and at any rate I
will call it so—it was opened to us by a very sprightly little old lady, with
one tooth standing boldly up in the centre of her lower jaw, unafraid amid
the surrounding desolation. She smiled at us so kindly that we apologized
for our coming, and said that we did not suppose we could see the palace,
and then she looked grave, and answered, “Yes, but you’ll have to pay a fee,
sir,” I undertook that the fee should be paid, and then she smiled again, and
led the way from her nook in it, through one of the most livable houses I
was in anywhere in England. I will use the privilege of the superficial and
cursory observation of the hurried tourist, to which we are so well
accustomed in English travellers among ourselves, and say that the English
did not know what domestic comfort was till the times of the Tudors, and
were apparently forgetful of it afterwards. This palace of Henry VIII.,
which is rather simple for a palace, but may very well have been the sojourn
of Anne Boleyn and her daughter Queen Elizabeth in their visits to
Southampton, was divided above and below into large rooms, wainscotted
in oak, of a noble shapeliness, and from cellar to attic was full of good air,
without the draughts which the earlier and later English have found
advantageous in perpetuating the racial catarrh and rheumatism. The
apartments were of varying dignity from the ground floor up, and the
basement was so wholesome, that before the time of the present owner, who
had restored it to its former state, a family with eleven children lived there
in the greatest health as long as they were allowed to stay. Even in the attic,
the rooms, though rough, were pleasant, and there were so many that one of
them had got lost and could never be found, though the window of it still
shows plainly from the outside. This and much more the friendly dame
recounted to us in our passage through a mansion, which we found so
attractive that we of course tacitly proposed to buy it and live in it always.
Then she led us out into her kitchen-garden, running to the top of the
ancient city wall, and undermined, as she told us, by submarine passages.
But we could only find a flight of stone steps descending to the street
level below, where, if the reader is of a mind to follow, he will find the wall
falling wholly away at times, and at times merging itself in the modern or
moderner buildings, and then reappearing in arches, topped with quaint
roofs and chimneys, and here and there turned to practical uses in little
workshops, much as old walls are in the dear Italian towns which we
Americans know rather better than the English, though the English ruins are
befriended by a softer summer, prolonging itself with its mosses and its ivy
never sere deep into winters almost as mild as Italy’s. In an avenue
reluctantly leaving the ancient wall and winding deviously into the High
Street, are the traces, in humbler masonry, of the jambs and spandrels of far
older arches in the façade of an edifice presently a cow stable, but famed to
have been the palace of that King Canute who was mortified to find his
power inferior to the sea’s, and sharply rebuked his courtiers when they had
induced him to set his chair in reach of the tides which would not ebb at his
bidding. The tides have now permanently ebbed from the scene of the
king’s discomfiture, and as this royal Dane was otherwise so able and
shrewd a prince as to have made himself master of England if not of her
seas, we may believe as little as we like of the story. For my part, I choose
to believe it every word, as I always have believed it, and I think it should
still be a lesson to royalty, which is altogether too credulous of its relative
importance to the rest of the universe.
In the most conspicuous niche of the beautiful old Bargate, which
remains sole of the seven portals of the city, and still spans with its archway
the High Street hard by where Porter’s Lane creeps into it from Canute’s
cow stable, is the statue of another British prince who was to take a seat
even farther back than Canute’s, under an overruling providence. In this
effigy George III. naturally wears the uniform of a Roman warrior, but
perhaps the artificial stone of which it is composed more aptly symbolizes
the extremely friable nature of human empire. One never can look at any
presentment of the poor, good, mistaken man without the softness of regret
for his long sufferings, or without gratitude for what he involuntarily did for
us as a people in forcing us to rid ourselves of royalty for good and all; yet
with our national prejudice, it is always a surprise for the American to find
him taken seriously in England. On the Bargate he seems to stand between
us and the remoter English antiquity to which we willingly yield an
unbroken allegiance. When I looked on the mediæval work of the Bargate, I
easily felt myself, in a common romantic interest, the faithful subject of
Edward III. or Richard III., but when I came down to George III. I had to
draw the line; and yet he was a better and not unwiser man than either of
the others. You can say of Edward III. that he was luckier in war than
George III., but then he had not the Americans to fight against as the allies
of the French.
We were so well advised not to fail of seeing the ruins of Netley Abbey,
which is such a little way off from Southampton across the river Itchen, that
I should strongly counsel, in my turn, all fellow-countrymen arriving on
whatever line, to keep half a day from London, and give it to that most
beautiful and pathetic place. It was our first ruin in England, but though we
saw ruins afterwards of great merit, none ever surpassed it in charm, and
none remains so sweet and pensive a memory. From the strenuous modern
city you reach this dim, mediæval shadow by way of what they poetically
call at Southampton the Floating Bridge, and which, before we came to it,
we fancied some form of stately pontoon, but found simply the sort of
ferry-boat common in earlier times on American rivers East and West,
forced by the tide on supporting chains from one shore to the other. At our
landing on the farther side we agreed with the driver of a fly, who justly
refused to abate his reasonable charge, to carry us along the borders of the
Itchen in a rapture which might have been greater if the wind had not been
so bitter. But it was great enough, and when we dismounted at the gate of
the abbey, and made our way to its venerable presence over turf that yielded
perhaps too damply to the foot, we had our content so absolute, that not the
sunniest day known to the English climate could have added sensibly to it. I
do not believe that we could have been happier in it even if we had known
all the little why and how together with the great when of its suppression by
Henry VIII. Even now I cannot supplement the conjecture of the moment
by anything especially dramatic from history. Netley Abbey, like the rest of
the religious houses which Henry hammered down, was suppressed in the
general hope of pillage, defeated by the fact that its income was rather less
than a hundred and fifty pounds a year, which even in the money of the

THE OLD TOWER WALL

time was no great booty. The king had as little to envy those Cistercian
monks in their life as their income, except perhaps their virtues, which he
would not have wished to share. For, as our faithful guide-book told us,
they slept hard on the plank of wooden boxes, and unless food were given
them in alms they ate neither fish, flesh, fowl, eggs, butter nor cheese, but
only a spare porridge—twice a day, and in Lent once. They never spoke
except sometimes in their parlor, on religious topics, and on a journey they
could only ask questions, which they must ask if possible by signs. They
that transgressed the rules were whipped, or stretched upon the stone floor
during mass. For their greater humiliation the heads of the order were
entirely shaven, which if the wind blew from the sea in their day, as
piercingly as it blew in ours, was not so comfortable as it was picturesque
for the monks going about bareheaded in their white robes. Yet their
hospitality was great and constant, and their guest-hall was so often full that
Horace Walpole, in his much-quoted letter about their ruined house, could
speak with insinuation of their “purpled abbots,” as if these perhaps led a
life of luxury not shared by the humbler brethren. His picture of the abbey
is so charming and so true that one may copy it once again, as still the best
thing that could be said of it: “How shall I describe Netley to you? I can
only tell you that it is the spot in the world which I and Mr. Chute wish. The
ruins are vast and retain fragments of beautiful fretted roofs, pendent in the
air, with all variety of Gothic patterns of windows topped round and round
with ivy. Many trees have sprouted up among the walls, and only want to be
increased by cypresses. A hill rises above the Abbey, enriched with wood.
The fort in which we would build a tower for habitation, remains with two
small platforms. This little castle is buried from the Abbey, in the very
centre of a wood, on the edge of a wood hill. On each side breaks in the
view of the Southampton Sea, deep, blue, glittering with silver and vessels.
In short, they are not the ruins of Netley, but of Paradise. Oh, the purpled
abbots! What a spot they had chosen to slumber in! The scene is so
beautifully tranquil, yet so lively that they seem only to have retired into the
world.”
What can one have to say of Netley after this, even to the romantic touch
of the absent cypresses? We came suddenly upon the ruin, and with little
parley at the porter’s lodge where they charge admittance and sell
photographs, we stood within its densely ivied walls, the broken arches
beetling overhead, and the tall trees repairing their defect with a leafless
tracery showing fine against a gray sky hesitating blue, and the pale sun
filtering a wet silver through the clouds. In places the architecture still kept
its gracious lines of Gothic or Norman design; there were whole breadths of
wall to testify of the beauty and majesty that had been, and where walls
were marred or shattered, the ivy had bound up their wounds, or tufts of
soft foliage distracted the eye from their wrongs. Underfoot the damp grass
was starred with the earliest flowers of spring, violets, celandine, primrose;
and among the flocks of pigeons that made their homes in the holes of the
masonry left by the rotting joists, the golden-billed English blackbirds
fluttered and sang. You could trace the whole shape of the edifice, and see it
almost as it once stood, but the ivy which holds it up is also pulling it down.
The decay seems mostly from the winds and rains, and the insidious malice
of vegetation, but men have aided from time to time in the destruction,
though not without the censure of their fellow-men. It is told, indeed, that a
purchaser of the ruin, two hundred years ago, was so wrought upon by the
blame of his friends when he wished to use its hallowed stone for other
building, that he began to dream of his own death by a keystone falling
from one of the arches he was destroying; his death actually happened,
though it was a heavy timber, and not a stone that crushed him. Everything
in the neighborhood of the ruin was in keeping with it: a baronial mansion
among the woods of an adjoining hill, villas within their shrubbery, and
when we came to drive back to the ferry, many pleasant farms and pretty
cottages behind their hedges of holly and whitethorn. An unusual number of
these were thatched, in the tradition of rustic roofs which is slowly, though
very slowly, dying out. The machine-threshed straw is so broken that it does
not make a good thatch, and the art of the thatcher is passing with the
quality of his material. Still we saw some new thatches, with occasionally
an old one so rotten that it must have been full of the vermin which such
shelters collect, and which could have walked away with it. Now and then
we met country people on our way, looking rather sallow and lean, but our
driver, perhaps from his contact with town-bred luxury, had a face of the
right purple, and here and there was a rustic visage of the rich, south-of-
England color showing warm in the pale sunset light.
When we had seen Netley Abbey, all the rest of the Southampton region
was left rather impoverished of the conventional touristic interest, but any
friend of man could still find abundant pleasure in it by mounting a tram-
top and riding far out towards the Itchen, along winding streets of low brick
houses, each with its little garden at the front or side, and with its hedge of
evergreen. Often these kindly looking homes were overhung by almond-
trees, palely pink, in bloom, and sometimes when they were more
pretentious, though they were never arrogant, they stood apart, all planted
round with shrubs and trees, like the dwellings in Hartford. The tram’s
course was largely through umbrageous avenues, or parklike spaces such as
seem to abound at Southampton, with now and then a stretch of gleaming
water, and here and there an open field with people playing cricket in it.
Swarms of holiday-makers strolled up and down, and though it might be a
Sunday, with no signs of a bad conscience in their harmless recreations.
There was much evidence of church-going in the morning, but little or
nothing in the afternoon. The aspect of the crowd was that of comfortable
wage-earners or shopkeepers for the most part, such as the flourishing port
maintains in ever-increasing multitude, with none of the squalor which
seems so inseparable from prosperity in Liverpool. The crowd affirms the
modern advance of Southampton in its rivalry with the commercial
metropolis of the north, but we were well content in one of our walks to
lose ourselves from it, and come upon a neighborhood of fine old houses,
standing in wide grounds, now run wild with neglected groves, but speaking
with the voices of their secular rooks of the social glory which has long
departed. These mansions meant that once there was a local life of ease and
splendor which could hold its own against London, as perhaps the life of no
other place in England now does. If you took them at twilight, their weed-
grown walks simply swarmed with ghosts of quality, in a setting transferred
bodily from the pages of old novels.

“THE TRAM’S COURSE WAS LARGELY THROUGH UMBRAGEOUS

AVENUES”
We had not the strength, social or moral, which their faded gentility
represented, to resist the pull of the capital, and in a few days, shrivelled
each to less than its twenty-four hours by the chill spring air, we yielded,
and started for London on the maddest, merriest afternoon of all the glad
Bank holidays of that Easter time. They have apparently not so much
leisure for good manners at Southampton as at Bath, or even at Plymouth;
the booking-clerk at the station met inquiries about trains as snubbingly as
any ticket-seller of our own could have done, and so we chanced it with one
of the many expresses, on first-class tickets that at any other time would
have insured us a whole compartment. As it was they got us two seats more
luxurious than money could buy in an American train, and we were fain to
be content. We were the more content, because, presently, we were running
through a forest greater than I can remember as in these latter days
bordering any American railroad. Miles and miles of country were thickly
wooded on either side, with only such cart-tracks and signs of woodcraft as
make the page of Thomas Hardy so wild and primitive after twenty
centuries of Briton, Roman, Saxon, Dane, and Norman, in that often
mastered but never wholly tamed England. We came now and then to a
wooden farm-house with its wooden barns and outhouses, in an image of
home which we would not have had more like if we could: we had not
come to England to be back in America. Yet such is the perversity of human
nature, that I who here am always idealizing a stone house as the fittest
habitation of man, and longing to live in one, exulted in these frame
cottages, and would have preferred one for my English dwelling; even the
wood-built stations we whisked by had a charm because they were like the
clapboarded depots, freight and passenger, at our rustic junctions.
Everywhere in England one sees building of wood to an amazing extent,
though the lumber for it is not cut from English woods, but comes rather
from Norway and elsewhere in the densely timbered north. Of course it did
not characterize the landscape even in the region of the New Forest, which
but for its name we should think so old, but the gray stone of the West-of-
England farmsteads and cottages had more and more given way to the
warm red brick of the easterly south. This, as we drew near London, paled
to the Milwaukee yellow, here and there, and when this color prevailed it
was smirched and smutted with the smoke holding the metropolis hidden
from us till we could, little by little, bear its immensity.
 VII

IN FOLKESTONE OUT OF SEASON

H OW long the pretty town, or summer city, of Folkestone on the

southeastern shore of Kent has been a favorite English watering-place,
I am not ready to say; but I think probably a great while. Very likely the
ancient Britons did not resort to it much; but there are the remains of
Roman fortifications on the downs behind the town, known as Cæsar’s
camp, and though Cæsar is now said not to have known of camping there,
other Roman soldiers there must have been, who could have come down
from the place to the sea for a dip as often as they got liberty. It is also
imaginable that an occasional Saxon or Dane, after a hard day’s marauding
along the coast, may have wished to wash up in the waters of the Channel;
but they could hardly have inaugurated the sort of season which for five or
six weeks of the later summer finds the Folkestone beaches thronged with
visitors, and the surf full of them. We ourselves formed no part of the
season, having come for the air in the later spring, when the air is said to be
tonic enough without the water. It is my belief that at no time of the year
can you come amiss to Folkestone; but still it is better to own at the outset
that you will not find it very gay there if you come at the end of April.
We thought we were doing a very original if not a very distinguished
thing in putting our hand-baggage into a fly at the station, and then driving
with it from house to house for an hour and more in search of lodgings. But
the very first people whom we told said they had done the same, and I dare
say it is the common experience at Folkestone, where, even out of season,
the houses whose addresses you have seem to be full-up, as the lodging-
house phrase is, and where although every other house in the place has the
sign of “Apartments” in the transoms, or the drawing-room windows, or
both, you have the greatest difficulty in fixing yourself. When one address
after another failed us, the driver of our fly began to take pity on us: too
great pity for our faith, for we began to suspect him of carrying us to
apartments in which he was interested; but we were never able to prove it,
and by severely opposing him, we flattered ourselves that we did not finally
go where he wanted. Perhaps we did, but if so it was the right place for us.
If one landlord had not what we wished, or had nothing, he cheerfully
referred us to another, and when we had seen the lodgings we decided were
the best, we did not and could not make up our minds to take them until we
tried yet one more, where we found the landlord full-up, but where he
commended us to the house we had just left as one of singular merit, in
every way, and with a repute for excellent cooking which we would find the
facts justify. We drove back all the more strenuously because of a fancied
reluctance in our driver, and found the landlord serenely expectant on the
pleasant lawn beside his house; he accepted our repentant excuses, and in
another minute we found ourselves in the spacious sitting-room which had
become ours, overlooking the brick-walled gardens of the adjoining houses
in the shelter,
 THE BEACH, FOLKESTONE
which slowly, very slowly, became the shade of a grove of tall, slim, young
trees. When a trio of tall, slim, young girls intent upon some out-door sport
in an interval of the rain, lounged through this grove, we felt that we could
not have made a mistake; when a black cat provided itself for one of the
garden walls, our reason was perfectly convinced. Fortune had approved
our resolution not to go, except in the greatest extremity, to any sort of
boarding-house, or any sort of hotel, private, residential, temperant or
inebriant, varying to the type of sea-side caravansary which is common to
the whole world, but to cling to an ideal of lodgings such as we had
cherished ever since our former sojourn in England, and such as you can
realize nowhere else in the world.
Our sitting-room windows did not look out upon the sea, as we had
planned, but with those brick walls and their tutelary cat, with these tall,
slim, young trees and girls before us, we forgot the sea. As the front of our
house was not upon the Leas (so the esplanaded cliffs at Folkestone are
called), you could not see the coast of France from it, as you could from the
house-fronts of the Leas in certain states of the atmosphere. But that sight
always means rain, and in Folkestone there is rain enough without seeing
the coast of France; and so it was not altogether a disadvantage to be one
corner back from the Leas on a street enfilading them from the north. After
the tea and bread and butter, which instantly appeared as if the kettle had
been boiling for us all the time, we ran out to the Leas, and said we would
never go away from Folkestone. How, indeed, could we think of doing such
a thing, with that lawny level of interasphalted green stretching eastward
into the town that climbed picturesquely up to meet it, and westward to the
sunset, and dropping by a swift declivity softened in its abruptness by
flowery and leafy shrubs? If this were not enough inducement to an eternal
stay, there was the provisionally peaceful Channel wrinkled in a friendly
smile at the depth below us, and shaded from delicate green to delicate
purple away from the long, brown beach on which it amused itself by
gently breaking in a snowy surf. In the middle distance was every manner
of smaller or larger sail, and in the offing little stubbed steamers smoking
along, and here and there an ocean-liner making from an American for a
German port; or if it was not an ocean-liner, we will call it so. Certainly
there could be no question of the business and pleasure shipping drawn up
on the beach, on the best terms with the ranks of bathing-machines patiently
waiting the August bathers with the same serene faith in them as the half-
fledged trees showed, that end-of-April evening, in the coming of the
summer which seemed so doubtful to the human spectator. For the
prevailing blandness of the atmosphere had keen little points and edges of
cold in it; and vagarious gusts caught and tossed the smoke from the
chimney-pots of the pretty town along the sea-level below the Leas, giving
away here to the wooded walks, and gaining there upon them. Inspired by
the presence of a steel pier half as long as that of Atlantic City, with the
same sort of pavilion for entertainments at the end, we tried to fancy that
the spring was farther advanced with us at home, but we could only make
sure that it would be summer sooner and fiercer. In the mean time, as it was
too late for the military band which plays every fine afternoon in a stand on
the Leas, the birds were singing in the gardens that border it, very sweetly
and richly, and not obliging you at any point to get up and
 THE PIER WITH ITS PAVILION
take your hat off by striking into “God Save the King.” I am not sure what
kind of birds they were; but I called them to myself robins of our sort, for
upon the whole they sounded like them. Some golden-billed blackbirds I
made certain of, and very likely there were larks and finches among them,
and nightingales, for what I knew. They all shouted for joy of the pleasant
evening, and of the garden trees in which they hid, and which were oftener
pleasant, no doubt, than the evening. The gardens where the trees stood
spread between handsome mansard-roofed houses of gray stucco, of the
same type as those which front flush upon the Leas, and which prevail in all
the newer parts of Folkestone; their style dates them of the sixties and
seventies of the last century, since when not many houses seem to have
been built in Folkestone.
Probably these handsome houses were not meant for the lodgings that
they have now so largely if not mostly become. It is said that the polite
resident population has receded before the summer-folk who have come in
and more and more possessed the place, and to whom the tradesman class
has survived to minister. At any rate it is the fate of Folkestone to grow
morally and civically more and more like Atlantic City, which somehow
persists in offering itself in its wild, wooden ugliness for a contrast as well
as a parallel of the English watering-place. Nothing could be more unlike
the Leas than the Board Walk; nothing more unlike their picturesque
declivity than the flat sands on which the vast hotels and toy cottages of the
New Jersey summer-resort are built; nothing more unlike the mild, many-
steamered, many-schoonered expanse of the Channel, than the
immeasurable, empty horizon, and the long, huge wash of the ocean. Yet, I
say, there is a solidarity of gay intent and of like devotion to brief alien
pleasures in which I find the two places inseparable in my mind.
If such a thing were possible, I should like to take the promenaders on
the Leas whom I saw in April, 1904, and interchange them with the same
number of those whom I saw two months before on the Board Walk fighting
their way against the northeasterly gale that washed the frozen foam far in
under it against the frozen sand. Yes, I should be satisfied if I could only
transpose the placid, respectable Bath-chairmen of the Leas, and the joyous
darkys who pushed the wheeled wicker-chairs of the Board Walk, and
turned first one cheek and then another to the blast, or took it in their
shining teeth, as they planted their wide, flat feet, wrapped in carpet, with a
rhythmical recklessness on the plank. I should like, if this could be done, to
ask the first, “Isn’t this something like Folkestone?” and the last, “Isn’t this
like Atlantic City?”
Perhaps it is only the sea that is alike in both, and the centipedal steel
piers that bestride it in either. The sea makes the exile at home everywhere,
for it washes his native shore and the alien coast with the same tides, and
only to-day the moss cast up on the shore at Dover breathed the odor that
blows in the face of the stroller on Lynn Beach, or the Long Sands at York,
Maine.
We were going by a corner of it to see the landing of the passengers from
the Calais boat, and to gloat upon what the misery of their passage had left
of them; but before we could reach the deck they had found shelter in their
special train for London. It used to be one of the chief amusements of the
visitors at Folkestone to witness such dishevelled debarkations at their own
Welcome to our website – the perfect destination for book lovers and
knowledge seekers. We believe that every book holds a new world,
offering opportunities for learning, discovery, and personal growth.
That’s why we are dedicated to bringing you a diverse collection of
books, ranging from classic literature and specialized publications to
self-development guides and children's books.

More than just a book-buying platform, we strive to be a bridge

connecting you with timeless cultural and intellectual values. With an
elegant, user-friendly interface and a smart search system, you can
quickly find the books that best suit your interests. Additionally,
our special promotions and home delivery services help you save time
and fully enjoy the joy of reading.

Join us on a journey of knowledge exploration, passion nurturing, and

personal growth every day!

ebookbell.com