The world, according to the best geographers, is divided into Europe,
Asia, Africa, America, and Romney Marsh. In this last-named and fifth
quarter of the globe, a witch may still be occasionally discovered in
favourable, _i. e._ stormy, seasons, weathering Dungeness Point in an
egg-shell, or careering on her broomstick over Dymchurch wall. A cow
may yet be sometimes seen galloping like mad, with tail erect, and an
old pair of breeches on her horns, an unerring guide to the door of
the crone whose magic arts have drained her udder. I do not, however,
remember to have heard that any conjuror has, of late, been detected in
the district.
Not many miles removed from the verge of this recondite region, stands
a collection of houses, which its maligners call a fishing-town, and
its well-wishers a Watering-place. A limb of one of the Cinque Ports,
it has (or lately had) a corporation of its own, and has been thought
considerable enough to give a second title to a noble family. Rome
stood on seven hills; Folkestone seems to have been built upon seventy.
Its streets, lanes, and alleys,--fanciful distinctions without much
real difference--are agreeable enough to persons who do not mind
running up and down stairs; and the only inconvenience at all felt by
such of its inhabitants as are not asthmatic, is when some heedless
urchin tumbles down a chimney, or an impertinent passenger peeps
into a garret window. At the eastern extremity of the town, on the
sea-beach, and scarcely above high-water mark, stood, in the good old
times, a row of houses then denominated "Frog-hole;" modern refinement
subsequently euphonized the name into "East-street:" but what's in
a name? the encroachments of Ocean have long since levelled all in
one common ruin. Here, in the early part of the seventeenth century,
flourished, in somewhat doubtful reputation, but comparative opulence,
a compounder of medicines, one Master Erasmus Buckthorne; the effluvia
of whose drugs from within, mingling agreeably with the "ancient and
fish-like smells" from without, wafted a delicious perfume throughout
the neighbourhood. At seven of the clock in the morning when Mrs.
Botherby's narrative commences, a stout Suffolk punch, about thirteen
hands and a half in height, was slowly led up and down before the door
of the pharmacopolist by a lean and withered lad, whose appearance
warranted an opinion, pretty generally expressed, that his master found
him as useful in experimentalizing as in household drudgery, and that,
for every pound avoirdupoise of solid meat, he swallowed at the least
two pounds troy-weight of chemicals and galenicals. As the town clock
struck the quarter, Master Buckthorne emerged from his laboratory, and,
putting the key carefully into his pocket, mounted the sure-footed cob
aforesaid, and proceeded up and down the acclivities and declivities of
the town with the gravity due to his station and profession. When he
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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