Certain Delightful English Towns by William Dean Howells

We 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.