a fleet of armed ships, under steam and under sail, shall burst
forth as will charge the old Medway – where the merry Stuart let
the Dutch come, while his not so merry sailors starved in the
streets – with something worth looking at to carry to the sea.
Thus I idle round to the Medway again, where it is now flood tide;
and I find the river evincing a strong solicitude to force a way
into the dry dock where Achilles is waited on by the twelve hundred
bangers, with intent to bear the whole away before they are ready.
To the last, the Yard puts a quiet face upon it; for I make my way
to the gates through a little quiet grove of trees, shading the
quaintest of Dutch landing-places, where the leaf-speckled shadow
of a shipwright just passing away at the further end might be the
shadow of Russian Peter himself. So, the doors of the great patent
safe at last close upon me, and I take boat again: somehow,
thinking as the oars dip, of braggart Pistol and his brood, and of
the quiet monsters of the Yard, with their ‘We don’t particularly
want to do it; but if it must be done – !’ Scrunch.
CHAPTER XXVII – IN THE FRENCH-FLEMISH COUNTRY
‘It is neither a bold nor a diversified country,’ said I to myself,
‘this country which is three-quarters Flemish, and a quarter
French; yet it has its attractions too. Though great lines of
railway traverse it, the trains leave it behind, and go puffing off
to Paris and the South, to Belgium and Germany, to the Northern
Sea-Coast of France, and to England, and merely smoke it a little
in passing. Then I don’t know it, and that is a good reason for
being here; and I can’t pronounce half the long queer names I see
inscribed over the shops, and that is another good reason for being
here, since I surely ought to learn how.’ In short, I was ‘here,’
and I wanted an excuse for not going away from here, and I made it
to my satisfaction, and stayed here.
What part in my decision was borne by Monsieur P. Salcy, is of no
moment, though I own to encountering that gentleman’s name on a red
bill on the wall, before I made up my mind. Monsieur P. Salcy,
‘par permission de M. le Maire,’ had established his theatre in the
whitewashed Hotel de Ville, on the steps of which illustrious
edifice I stood. And Monsieur P. Salcy, privileged director of
such theatre, situate in ‘the first theatrical arrondissement of
the department of the North,’ invited French-Flemish mankind to
come and partake of the intellectual banquet provided by his family
of dramatic artists, fifteen subjects in number. ‘La Famille P.
SALCY, composee d’artistes dramatiques, au nombre de 15 sujets.’
Neither a bold nor a diversified country, I say again, and withal
an untidy country, but pleasant enough to ride in, when the paved
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roads over the flats and through the hollows, are not too deep in
black mud. A country so sparely inhabited, that I wonder where the
peasants who till and sow and reap the ground, can possibly dwell,
and also by what invisible balloons they are conveyed from their
distant homes into the fields at sunrise and back again at sunset.
The occasional few poor cottages and farms in this region, surely
cannot afford shelter to the numbers necessary to the cultivation,
albeit the work is done so very deliberately, that on one long
harvest day I have seen, in twelve miles, about twice as many men
and women (all told) reaping and binding. Yet have I seen more
cattle, more sheep, more pigs, and all in better case, than where
there is purer French spoken, and also better ricks – round
swelling peg-top ricks, well thatched; not a shapeless brown heap,
like the toast of a Giant’s toast-and-water, pinned to the earth
with one of the skewers out of his kitchen. A good custom they
have about here, likewise, of prolonging the sloping tiled roof of
farm or cottage, so that it overhangs three or four feet, carrying