and enlargement returns to me. Ifeel again the faintpleasant
excitement of the boat train, the trampling procession of people
with hand baggage and laden porters along the platform of the
Folkestone pier, the scarcelyperceptible swaying of the moored boat
beneath our feet. Then, very obvious and simple, the littleemotion
of standing out from the homeland andseeing the long white Kentish
cliffs recede. One walked about the boat doing one's best not to
feel absurdly adventurous, and presently a movement of people
directed one's attention to a white lighthouse on a cliff to the
east of us, coming up suddenly; and then one turned to scan the
little different French coast villages, and then, sliding by in a
pale sunshine came a long wooden pier with oddly dressed children
upon it, and the clustering town of Boulogne.
One took it all with the outward calm that became a young man of
nearly three and twenty, but one was alive to one's finger-tips with
pleasing little stimulations. The custom house examination excited
one, the strangeness of a babble in a foreign tongue; one found the
French of City Merchants' and Cambridge a shy and viscous flow, and
then one was standing in the train as it went slowly through the
rail-laid street to Boulogne Ville, and one looked out at the world
in French, porters in blouses, workmen in enormous purple trousers,
police officers in peaked caps instead of helmets and romantically
cloaked, big carts, all on two wheels instead of four, green
shuttered casements instead of sash windows, and great numbers of
neatly dressed women in economical mourning.
"Oh! there's a priest!" one said, and was betrayed into suchlike
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