HARPER'S
Monthly Magazine
Vol. CIXNOVEMBER, 1904No. DCLIV
In Folkestone out of Season
HOW 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. 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 been aware of camping there, other Roman soldiers must have been there, who could have come down to the sea for a dip as often as they could "get 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 he 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 for me to own at the outset that you will not find it very gay there if you come at the end of April.
Our sitting-room windows did not look out upon the sea, as we had planned. The front of our house was not upon the Leas, as the esplanaded cliffs at Folkestone are called, and 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 they always have so good in England, and which instantly appeared, as if the kettle had been boiling for us from the beginning of 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 dropped southward 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 peaceable Channel wrinkled in n 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 were 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
Copyright, 1904, by Harper and Brothers. All rights reserved
