Certain Delightful English Towns Author:William Dean Howells Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: 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... more » 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 was 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 ourse...« less