of course higher than a cat can spring. The crumbs cast out upon
this platform would gather crowds of birds; they will come to feel at
home, and in spring time will return to build and sing.

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 woodbine crowns the bushes. The sickle has
gone over, and the poppies which grew so thick a while ago in the corn
no longer glow like a scarlet cloak thrown on the ground. But red spots
in waste places and by the ways are where they have escaped the steel.

A wood-pigeon keeps pace with the train--his vigorous pinions can race
against an engine, but cannot elude the hawk. He stops presently among
the trees. How pleasant it is from the height of the embankment to look
down upon the tops of the oaks! The stubbles stretch away, crossed with
bands of green roots where the partridges are hiding. Among flags and
weeds the moorhens feed fearlessly as we roll over the stream: then
comes a cutting, and more heath and hawkweed, harebell, and bramble
bushes red with unripe berries.

Flowers grow high up the sides of the quarries; flowers cling to the
dry, crumbling chal