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instantly lengthened to any extent desired. Monks, too, it was said, whose cassocks had been washed, and shrunk in the process, could always get them unshrunk in the same marvellous way; but this must be an error of the most flagrant kind, for we know that those holy men washed themselves little, and their clothes never. But whatever marvellous things she could do, she was capable of the comparatively simple feat of preventing her original conventual church being washed away by the sea.

not

very largely the They were said to Twitted on some present historian

Folkestone people were of old butt of the neighbouring towns. be stupid beyond the ordinary. occasion that has escaped the with not being able to celebrate a given event in poetry, the town produced a poet eager to disprove the accusation. To show what he could do in that way, he took as his theme a notable capture that Folkestone had just then made, and wrote:

A whale came down the Channel;

The Dover men could not catch it,
But the Folkestoners did.

He was, it will be conceded, not even so near an approach to a poet as that mayor who read an address to Queen Elizabeth, beginning with,

"Most Gracious Queen,
Welcome to Folkesteen.”

to which Her Majesty is said to have replied,

"You great fool,

Get off that stool!"

But doubtless these be all malicious inventions.

Certainly, though, "great Eliza" did visit Folkestone, and we can have no doubt that the usual address was read-can even see and hear in imagination that mayor reading abysmal ineptitudes "um-umer-er," like some blundering bumble-bee, the atmosphere growing thick and drowsy with falsities, platitudes, and infinite bombast, until that virginal but vinegary monarch cuts him rudely short. We can see-O! most clear-sighted that we are !—that tall and angular spinster, sharp-visaged, with high, beak-like nose, greatly resembling a gaunt henbut a very game hen-actually cutting short that turbid flow of mayoral eloquence! we wonder she does not peck him.

Still hazardously up and down go those old streets and lanes of the old town-Beach Street, North Street, Fenchurch Street, Radnor Street, and East Street, whence you look out upon Copt Point and the serried tiers upon tiers of chalk cliffs stretching in the direction of Dover. Still the Martello tower stands upon that point, as it stands in the illustration of Folkestone by Turner, but the swarming population of to-day has blotted out much of that obvious romance that once burst full upon the visitor. The romance is still there, but you have to seek it and dig deep beneath the strata of modern changes before it is found. Trivial things dot the i's, cross the t's, and generally emphasise this triumph of convention. “Lanes "become “ streets,” and that quaintly illiterate old rendering, "Rendavowe" Street, was long since thought by no means worthy of more educated times, and accordingly changed to the correct spelling of "Rendezvous it now bears.

Modern Folkestone is already, by effluxion of time, becoming sharply divided into modern and more modern. The ancient Folkestone we have seen to be the fishing village, the first development from whose humble but natural existence, in days when seaside holidays began to be an institution and the "resorts." set out upon their career of artificiality, was the "Pavilionstone" of Dickens and Cubitt. The trail of Cubitt, who built that South Kensington typified by the Cromwell Road, and was followed by his imitators throughout the western suburbs of London in the 'fifties and 'sixties, is all over the land, and is very clearly defined on the Folkestone Leas, whose houses are in the most approved grey stucco style. The Leas therefore are not Folkestone, but, as Dickens dubbed them, "Pavilionstone," or, more justly, Notting-Hill-onSea. They and their adjacent contemporary streets are the seaside resort of yesterday; the red-brick and terra-cotta houses and hotels, in adaptation of Elizabethan Gothic and Jacobean Renaissance, that of to-day, a newer and grander place than Cubitt conceived or Dickens knew.

All those magnificent streets, those barrack-like hotels, all those bands and gay parterres, and all the fashion that makes Folkestone the most expensive seaside resort on the south coast, are excrescences. That only is Folkestone where you really do smell the salt water and can seek refuge from the cigarsmoke and the Eau-de-Cologne, the wealthy, the idle, and the vicious, to come to the folk who earn their livelihood by the sea and its fish, and are individual and racy of the water and the always interesting waterside life.

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After J. M. W. Turner, R.A.

FOLKESTONE IN 1830.

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