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.
These objects and actors on other but similar scenes, that both eye and hand had kept copies of, perhaps for years, were now transferred by the painter to his canvas “to improve the occasion” by giving life and interest to a spot—beautiful always, though at the time barren of incident—which in the process of years most often present such stirring aspects as he then depicted.
I recalled the admirable pictures of my, alas! deceased friend, when my eye fell on the photographs ranged on the sides of the railway carriage that bore me to Cromer last summer.
We may well be thankful the Great Eastern Railway for the pleasure these cannot fail to give to the weary traveller.
As the ear soon ceases to be affected by the roaring of a Giessbach, so the eye becomes blind almost to those, perhaps, necessary evils, the huge placards that cover the walls of station after station. But the same advertisement reduced and ingeniously inserted between the pages of the Magazine that we listlessly turn over, spring on us ever and anon from their ambushes, and cannot be ignored; and the message they bring is often as prompt, if not as painful, a thrust into one’s memory and heart as was Ehud’s into the obese body of Eglon, King of Moab.
Such a-going upstairs in a carrying chair as meets the eye when the finger turns to the index of contents, if not a sad remembrancer of some sufferer near and dear, is distressingly suggestive of the ills that one’s own flesh may be heir to, and the numbness of leg resulting from long sitting is apt to be magnified by apprehension into creeping paralysis.
While the complacency of the matron in her sixth decade, asserting a claim to the complexion of sweet seventeen, is so cheeky, and we feel annoyed that our attention should be called to the matter.
Horace’s line, “mors et fugacem persequitur virum,” would be a cunningly alarming motto for the many systems of life assurance that tout in the same quarters for custom, and often frighten one into carrying grist to their mills. And if committed deeply to premium-paying already, and the annual shelling-out time is drawing near, the thought how to meet the inexorable call and holiday expenses together may cause qualm enough to make one’s next meal dyspeptic.
What a relief it is to get clear from such insalutary thoughts, and to look up from the vibrating lines of a paper or book to the well-defined photographs that now adorn the carriages of the Great Eastern Railway.
Caister Castle, Beeston Ruins, North Repps Cottage, Somerleyton, Gunton, the wave-lapped beaches of the nerve-bracing Norfolk coast, and the various Broads, beget an instant desire to be knickered and jerseyed, and to rough it for a times in and about these restful solitudes. The pictures are pleasing to the eye, and helpful to the mind that would, even en route, be forming some pleasant plans for a free and easy life in the immediate future, and rid itself of the black care that used to sit behind the horseman, but in our days boldly essays to take a seat cheek by jowl with the railway traveller, and to glare into his eyes.