Certain Delightful English Towns by William Dean Howells

Dover is a place which looks its history as little as any famous town I / know. It lies smutched with smoke, along the shore, and it is as / commonplace as some worthy town of our own which has grown to like / effect in as many decades as Dover has taken centuries. The difference / in favor of Dover is that when at last you get outside of it, you are / upon the same circle of downs that backs Folkestone, and on the top of / one of them you are overawed by the very noble castle, which too few / people, who know the place as the landing of the Calais boat, ever think / of. Up and steeply up we mounted, with a mounting sense of never getting / there; but at last, after passing red-coated soldiers stalking upward, / and red-cheeked children stooping downward to pick the wayside flowers, / hardily blowing in the keen sea-wind, we reached the ancient fortress / and waited in a court-yard till we were many enough to be herded through / it by a warder of a jocosity which I have not known elsewhere in / England. He had a joke for the mimic men in armor which had to be / constantly painted to keep the damp off; for the thickness of the walls; / for the lantern that flings a faint glimmer, a third way down the / unfathomable castle well; for the disparity between our multitude and / the French father and daughter whom he had shown through just before us. / At different points he would begin, "I always say, 'ere," and then / pronounce some habitual pleasantry. He called our notice to a crusader / effigy's tall two-handed sword, and invited us to enjoy his custom of / calling it "‘is toothpick."

All would not do. We kept sternly or densely silent; so far from / laughing, not one of us smiled. In the small chamber which served as the / bedroom of Charles I. and Charles II. on their visit to the castle, he / showed the narrow alcove where the couch of these kings had once lurked, / and then looked around at us and sighed deeply, as for some one to say / that it was rather like a coal-cellar. In England, one does not make / merry even with by-gone royalty; it is as if the unwritten law which / renders it bad form to speak with slight of any member of the reigning / family were retroactive, and forbade trifling with the family it has / displaced. I knew the warder was aching to joke at the expense of that / alcove, and I ached in sympathy with him, but we both remained / respectfully serious. His herd received all his humorous comment with a / dulness, or a heartlessness, I do not know which, such as I have never / seen equalled, in so much that, coming out last, I pressed a shy / sixpence into his palm with the bated explanation, "That's for the / jokes," and his sad face lighted up with a joy that I hope was for the / appreciation and not for the sixpence.

We went once to Dover, but many times, as I have recorded, to Hythe, / which was once the home of smuggling, and where there is still a little / ale-house that poetically, pathetically, remembers the happy past by its / sign of "Smuggler's Retreat. " It is said that there was formerly / smuggling pretty much along the whole coast, and there is a / heartrending story of charred bales of silk, found in a farm-house / chimney, long after they were hidden there, where the hearth-fires of / many years had done their worst with them. It grieves the spirit still / to think of the young hearts which those silks, timely and fitly worn, / would have gladdened or captivated. But Hythe could hardly ever, even in / the palmiest days of smuggling, have been a haunt of fashion, though the / police-station, in the long, rambling street, had apparently once been / an assembly-room, if one might trust the glimpses caught, from the top / of one's charabanc, of the interiors of rooms far statelier than suit / the simple needs or tastes of modern crime.

I do not know why my thought should linger with special fondness in / Hythe, for all the region far and near was alive with equal allurements. / Famous and hallowed Canterbury itself was only an hour or so away, and / yet we kept going day after day to Hythe for no better reason, perhaps, / than that the charabanc ran accessibly by the corner of our lodgings in / Folkestone, while it required a special effort of the will to call a fly / and drive to the station and thence take the train for a city whose / origin, in the local imagination at least, is prehistoric, and was / undeniably a capital of the ancient Britons. The generous ignorance in / which I finally approached was not so ample as to include association / with Chaucer's Pilgrims, or the fact that Canterbury is the seat of the / primate of all England; and it distinctly faltered before extending / itself to the tragic circumstances of Thomas à Becket's murder. / Otherwise it was most comprehensive, and I suppose that few travellers / have perused the pages of Baedeker relating to the place with more / surprise. The manual which one buys in all places is for the / retrospective enjoyment and identification of their objects of interest, / and my "Canterbury Official Guide to the Cathedral Church, and Hand-book / of the City," could do no more than agreeably supplement, long / afterwards, the prompt information of the indefatigable German.