Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/890

A sunny Afternoon

The sun shone impartially upon the birds and upon us, so that an overcoat became oppressive, and the climb back to the Leas by the steep hillside paths impossible. If it had not been for the elders reading newspapers, and the lovers reading each other's thoughts on all the benches, it might have been managed; but as it was we climbed down after climbing halfway up, and retraced our steps towards Sandgate, where we took a fly for the drive back to Folkestone. Our fly driver (it is not the slang it sounds) said there would be time within the hour we bargained for to go round through the camp at Shorncliffe, and we providentially arrived on the parade-ground while the band was still playing to a crowd of the masses who love military music everywhere, and especially hang tranced upon it in England. If I had some particularly vivid pots of paint instead of the cold black and white of ink and paper, I might give some notion in color of the way the red-coated soldiery flamed out of the intense green of the plain, and how the strong purples and greens and yellows and blues of the women's dresses gave the effect of some gaudy garden all round them. American women say that English women of all classes wear, and can wear, colors in this soft atmosphere that would shriek aloud in our clear, pitiless air. When the band ceased playing, and the deity had been musically invoked once more to save the King, and each soldier had paired off and strolled away with the maid who had been simple-heartedly waiting for him, it was as gigantic tulips and hollyhocks walking. The camp at Shorncliffe is for ten thousand soldiers, I believe, of all arms, who are housed in a town of brick and wooden cottages, with streets and lanes of its own; and many of the officers have their quarters there as well as the men. Once these officers' families lived in Folkestone, and something of the decay of its prosperity is laid to their removal, which was caused by its increasing expensiveness. Probably none of them dwell in the tents which our drive brought us in sight of, beyond the barrack-town pitched in the middle of a green, green field, and lying like heaps of snow on the rank verdure. The old church of Cheriton, with a cloud of immemorial associations with Briton, and Roman, and Saxon, and Dane, and Norman, rose