The truth is we were flown with the beauty of the scene, which we afterwards found as great by day as by night. The promenade, which may have other reasons for calling itself as it does besides being shaped like the blade of a hoe, is a promontory pushed well out into the sound, with many islands and peninsulas clustered before it, or jutting towards it and forming a safe roadstead for shipping of all types. Plymouth is not a chief naval station of Great Britain without the presence of warships in its harbor; and among the peaceful craft at anchor with their riding-lights showing in the deeps of the sea and air one could distinguish the huge kraken shapes of modern cruisers and destroyers, and what not. But like the embattled figures of the marine and land-going soldiery, flirting on the benches of the promenade with females as fearless as themselves, or Jauntily strolling up and down under the moon, the ships tended to an effect of subjective peacefulness, as if invented merely for the pleasure of the appreciative stranger. We were, at any rate, very glad of them, and appreciated the municipal efforts in our behalf as gratefully as the imperial fortifications of the harbor. It must be confessed at once, if I am ever to claim any American superiority in these "trivial, fond records," which I shall never be able to help making comparative, that in what is done by the public for the public, we are hardly in the same running with England. It is only when we reflect upon our greater municipal virtue, and consider how the economies of our civic servants in the matter of beauty enable them to spend the more in good works, that we can lift up our heads and look down on what England has everywhere wrought for the people in such unspiritual things as parks and gardens, and terraces and promenades and statues. I could have wished that first evening, before I committed myself to any wrong impression or association, that I had known something more, or even anything at all, of the history of Plymouth. But I did not even know that from the Hoe, and possibly the very spot where I stood, the brave Trojan Cirenseus hurled the giant Goemagot into the sea. I was quite as far from remembering any facts of the British civilization which has always flourished so splendidly in the fancy of the native bards, and which has mingled its relics with those of the Roman, not only in the neighborhood of Plymouth, but all over England. As for the facts that Plymouth had been harried throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries by the incursions of the French; that it was the foremost English port in the time of Elizabeth; that Drake sailed from it in 1585 to bring back the remnant of Raleigh's colony from Virginia; that one hundred and twenty-seven English ships waited in its waters to meet the Spanish Armada; that it stood alone in the West of England for the Parliament in the Civil War; that Charles II. had signified his displeasure with it for this by building to overawe it the entirely useless fortress in the harbor; and that it was the first town to declare for William of Orange when he landed to urge the flight of the last Stuart: I do not suppose there is any half-educated school-boy but has the facts more about him than I had that first night in Plymouth when I might have found them so serviceable. I could only have matched him in my certainty that this was the Plymouth from which the Mayflower sailed to find, or to found, another Plymouth in the New World; but he could easily have alleged more proofs of our common conviction than I. At sunset, which they have in Plymouth appropriately late for the spring season and the high latitude, there had been a splotch of red about six feet square in the watery west, promising the fine weather which the morning brought. It also brought more red coats and swagger-sticks in company with the large hats and glaring costumes which had not had so good a chance the night before, whether we saw them in our walk on the Hoe, or met them in the ramble through the town into which we prolonged it. Through the still Sunday morning air there came a drumming and bugling of religious note from the neighboring fortifications, and while we listened, a general officer, or perhaps only a colonel, very tight in the gold and scarlet of his uniform, passed across the Hoe, like a pillar of flame, on his way to church. But I do not know that he was a finer bit of color, after all, than the jet-black cat with a vivid red ribbon at her neck, which had chosen to crouch on the ivied stone-wall across the way from our hotel, in just the spot where the sun fell earliest and would lie longest. There was more ivy than sun in Plymouth, that is the truth, and this cat probably knew what she was about. There was ivy, ivy everywhere, and there were subtropical growths of laurel and oleander and the like, which made a pleasant confusion of earlier Italy and later Bermuda in the brain, and yet were so characteristic of that constantly self-contradictory England.
Many things of it that I had known in flying and poising visits during fifty years of the past began to steal back into my consciousness. The nine-o'clock breakfast, of sole and eggs and bacon, and heavy bread and washy coffee, was of the same moral texture as the sabbatical silence in the pale sunny air, which now I remembered so well, with some weird question whether I was not all the while in Quebec, instead of Plymouth, and the strong conviction at the same time that this was the absurdest of obsessions. The Hoe was not Durham Terrace, but it looked down on a sort of Lower Town from a height almost as great, and the spread of the harbor, with a little help, recalled the confluence of the St. Lawrence and the St. Charles. But the rows of small houses that sent up the smoke of their chimneypots were of yellow brick, not of wood or gray stone, and their red roofs were tiled in dull weather-worn tints, and not brilliantly tinned.
Why, I wonder, do we feel such a pleasure in finding different things alike? It is rather stupid, but we are always trying to do it and fatiguing ourselves with the sterile effect. At Plymouth there was so much to remind me of so much else that it was a relief to be pretty promptly confronted on the Hoe with something so positive, so absolute as a Bath chair, which at the worst could only remind me of something in literature. A stubby old man was tugging it over the ground slowly, as if through a chapter of Dickens; and a wrathful-looking invalid lady sat within, just as if she had got into it from a book. There was little to recall anything else in the men strolling about in caps and knickerbockers, with short pipes in their mouths, or, equally with short pipes, wheeling back and forth on bicycles. There were a few people in top-hats, who had unmistakably the air of having got them out for Sunday; though why everyone did not wear them every day in the week was the question when we presently saw a shop-window full of them at three and sixpence apiece.
This was when we had gone down into the town from the Hoe, and found its quiet streets of an exquisite Sunday neatness. They were quite empty, except for very washed-up-looking worshippers going to church, among whom a file of extremely little boys and girls, kept in. line and kept moving by a black-gowned church-sister, gave us, with their tender pink cheeks and their tender blue eyes, our first delight in the wonderful West-of-England complexion. The trams do not begin running in any provincial town till afternoon on Sundays, and the loud-rattling milk-carts, bearing bright brass-topped cans as big as the ponies that drew them, seemed the only vehicles abroad. The only shops open were those for the sale of butter and eggs and fruit and flowers; but these necessaries and luxuries abounded in many windows and doorways, especially the flowers, which had already begun to arrive everywhere by tons from the Channel Islands, though it was then so early in March. It is not the least of the advantages which England enjoys that she has her Florida at her door; she has but to put out her hand and it is heaped with flowers