TO BRIGHTON 



THE smooth express to Brighton has 

 scarcely, as it seems, left the metrop- 

 olis 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 meet- 

 ing, 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 thin- 

 ner, and harebells on the very summit : these are 

 but a few upon which the eye lights while gliding by, 

 243 



