Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/889

The Shelter under the Leas

obscured by fog during our stay; but there were clouds that came and went, but came more than they went. One night there was absolute fog, which blew in from the sea in drifts showing almost like snow in the electric lamps; and at momently intervals the siren horn at the pier lowed like some unhappy cow, crazed for her wandering calf, and far, far out from the blind deep, the Boulogne boat bellowed its plaintive response. But there was, at other times, sunshine quite as absolute. Our last Sunday at Folkestone was one of such sunshine, and all the morning long the sky was blue, blue as I had fancied it could be blue only in America or in Italy. Besides this there remains the sense of much absolute sunshine from our first Sunday morning, when we walked along under the Leas toward Sandgate as far as to the Elizabethan castle on the shore. We found it doubly shut because it was Sunday and because it was not yet Whit-Monday, until which feast of the church it would not be opened. It is only after serious trouble with the almanac that the essentially dissenting American discovers the date of these church feasts which are confidently given in public announcements in England, as clearly fixing this or that day of the month; but we were sure we should not be there after Whit-Monday, and we made what we could of the outside of the castle, and did not suffer our exclusion to embitter us. Nothing could have embittered us that Sunday morning as we strolled along that pleasant way, with the sea on one side and the seaside cottages on the other, and occasionally pressing between us and the beach. Their presence so close to the water spoke well for the mildness of the winter, and for the winds of all seasons. On any New England coast they would have frozen up and blown away: but here they stood safe among their laurels, with their little vegetable-gardens beside them; and the birds, which sang among their budding trees, probably never left off singing the year round, except in some extraordinary stress of weather, or when occupied in plucking up the sprouting pease by the roots and eating the seed-pease. To prevent their ravage, and to restrict them to their business of singing, the rows of young pease were netted with a somewhat coarser mesh than that used in New Jersey to exclude the mosquitoes, but whether it was effectual or not, I do not know.