five o’clock in the afternoon
But , our French watering-place , when it is once got into , is a very enjoyable place . It has a varied and beautiful country around it , and many characteristic and agreeable things within it . To be sure , it might have fewer bad smells and less decaying refuse , and it might be better drained , and much cleaner in many parts , and therefore infinitely more healthy . Still , it is a bright , airy , pleasant , cheerful town ; and if you were to walk down either of its three well-paved main streets , towards five o'clock in the afternoon , when delicate odours of cookery fill the air , and its hotel windows -LRB- it is full of hotels -RRB- give glimpses of long tables set out for dinner , and made to look sumptuous by the aid of napkins folded fan-wise , you would rightly judge it to be an uncommonly good town to eat and drink in . We have an old walled town , rich in cool public wells of water , on the top of a hill within and above the present business-town ; and if it were some hundreds of miles further from England , instead of being , on a clear day , within sight of the grass growing in the crevices of the chalk-cliffs of Dover , you would long ago have been bored to death about that town . It is more picturesque and quaint than half the innocent places which tourists , following their leader like sheep , have made impostors of . To say nothing of its houses with grave courtyards , its queer by-corners , and its many-windowed streets white and quiet in the sunlight , there is an ancient belfry in it that would have been in all the Annuals and Albums , going and gone , these hundred years if it had but been more expensive to get at .