Go to Cromer

Transcribed from the 1889 Agas H. Goose edition by David Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org
BY A RURAL RECTOR.
Norwich : AGAS H. GOOSE, RAMPANT HORSE STREET. 1889.
“You should have gone to Cromer, my dear, if you went anywhere. Dr. Perry was a week at Cromer once, and he holds it to be the best of all sea-bathing places. A fine open sea, he says, and very pure air.”— Emma , by Jane Austen, page 72.
When do the dog-days begin? “Francis Moore, Physician,” and other authorities, ancient and modern, tell us on the 3rd of July. But the puzzling star, Sirius, in its gradual recession from our world, has not only changed its complexion from the ruddy hue of youth to the pallor of age, but owing either to the parsimonious habits of increasing years, or, perhaps, bodily infirmity, it has often withheld of late years the full downpour of its (supposed) heat-raising rays until the end of the month.
As soon, however, as the historic period of its influence returns, the crave for change and relief from the ties and worries of business of every kind, and town life generally, becomes well-nigh irresistible.
Now, as one who has for many a year resolutely sought, or made opportunity, to obey the annual prompting of nature to change his heaven—a feeling akin to the periodical impulse of winged bipeds to migrate—thus, and thus only, perhaps, maintaining in healthy vigour such power of mind and body as he has been endowed with, to a time of life when many shrink from the activities of muscular exertion, if they have not long ago abandoned pedestrian exploration and cycle tours, which the writer has not, let me back up the opinion of the faculty, as represented by Mr. Woodhouse’s family doctor, in the quotation at the head of this paper, and recommend a visit of fair length to Cromer, combined with such mild expeditions in its neighbourhood, by sea and land, as may be possible and convenient.
Far back in the pleasant past, I spent a holiday week at the Land’s End, with a Cornish coast-painter of some fame and success. While I splashed my block in rough representation of the yellow sands, the many-hued rocks, bearded with a patriarchal growth of hoary lichen, the pea-green fore sea and purple distance, he was composing close by two or three large pictures of the same scenes, putting in a stranded vessel here, or making the sea alive there with fishers and their nets and boats—the latter almost on the move beneath the leverage of the long oars, or the force on the bulging sails of the unseen wind blowing where it listed.