For the sake, however, of the chance reader who belongs to neither class, I will announce the produce of the pots with which the boats are laden, as Cromer crabs! ’Tis pleasant, sure, to see their name in print, and there is a pleasure in the utterance of the alliterative compound—yet let me assure all whom it may concern that the fame of the crustacean depends not in the least on “apt alliteration’s artful aid,” but on its intrinsic worth gastronomically; “experience hath made me sage.”
From this digression I must go veritably backwards, as these crabs that have led me astray are erroneously said by some to do in their peregrinations among the mermaids at the bottom of the deep blue sea, and make my adieu under the trees that rise, as Ruskin says, “not like others against the sky in dots and knots, but in fringes.” The sun shines beneficently in his full strength; and while a slight shade from the direct rays is undeniably pleasant, a balmy air sweeps from the cool sea over the really yellow sands, and up the ochery cliffs, and along the green sward of the uplying fields, drifting before it and distributing a mixture of the various essences from the gardens of the deep, and the salubrious resiny exhalations of the pines belauded above, and the sweet breath of the thick-growing clover flowers, for the behoof of all, and the delectation of such as rightly value these superlative delicacies.
O. W. Holmes knew what to seek as a sufferer from—
“This dead recoil
Of weary fibres stretched with toil:
The poise that flutters faint and low
When summer’s seething breezes blow:
Curtained beneath a singing pine,
Its murmuring voice shall blend with mine.”
And he might have added, had he the good luck to be in Cromer, that the lark would certainly take the soprano part without invitation, and complete the trio, for this is no
“Gloomy shore,
Which skylark never warbles o’er.”
On the contrary, few suns rise and set on this health-giving coast without many tuneful and prolonged greetings from this happiest of happy birds. I know that there is scarcely a day throughout the year—and I have been here in the drear depths of December—of which it could not be said
“Streaming as from heavenly springs,
So spreads a mist of melody,
The Staubbach of our sunny skies,
The lark’s down-sprinkling minstrelsy.”
Tennyson, in “The Lotus-eaters,” has some lines which had all the effect of a lullaby on me when I recalled them as I lazed on the hill brows above Cromer:—
“How sweet while warm airs lull us, blowing lowly,
With half-dropt eyelids still,
Only to hear and see the far-off sparkling brine;
Only to hear were sweet, stretched out beneath the pine.”