Certain Delightful English Towns by William Dean Howells

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; 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 Cesar's / camp, and though Cesar 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, / 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.