207 



TO BRIGHTON. 



THE smooth express to Brighton has scarcely, as it 

 seems, left the metropolis when the banks of the 

 railway become coloured with wild flowers. Seen for 

 a moment in swiftly passing, they border the line 

 like a continuous garden. Driven from the fields by 

 plough and hoe, cast out from the pleasure-grounds 

 of modern houses, pulled up and hurled over the wall 

 to wither as accursed things, they have taken refuge 

 on the embankment and the cutting. 



There they can flourish and ripen their seeds, little 

 harassed even by the scythe and never by grazing 

 cattle. So it happens that, extremes meeting, the 

 wild flower, with its old-world associations, often grows 

 most freely within a few feet of the wheels of the 

 locomotive. Purple heathbells gleam from shrub -like 

 bunches dotted along the slope; purple knapweeds 

 lower down in the grass ; blue scabious, yellow hawk- 

 weeds where the soil is thinner, and harebells on the 

 very summit ; these are but a few upon which the eye 

 lights while gliding by. 



Glossy thistledown, heedless whither it goes, comes 

 in at the open window. Between thickets of broom 

 there is a glimpse down into a meadow shadowed by 



