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 hawkweeds 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 the trees 

 of a wood. It is bordered with the cool green of brake 

 fern, from which a rabbit has come forth to feed, and 

 a pheasant strolls along with a mind, perhaps, to the 

 barley yonder. Or a foxglove lifts its purple spire ; or 



