“The wind is east, sir!” he said to Caput, almost with tears,—“and when it sets in that quarter, draughts are deadly.”
We laughed, thanked him and declared that we were used to east winds, and continued to seek the breeziest places until every one of us was seized with influenza viler than any that ever afflicted us in the middle of a Northern winter. Upon Caput, the most robust of the party, it settled most grievously. The dregs were an attack of bronchitis that defied all remedies for a month, then sent him back to the Continent for cure. I mention this instance of over-confidence in American constitutions and ignorance of the English climate as a warning to others as rash and unlearned.
The wind stayed in the east all the time we were in Brighton and the sun’s ardor did not abate. Our host had a good library,—a rarity in a lodging-house, and we “lazed” away noon-tides, book or fancy-work in hand. We had morning drives into the country and evening rambles in the Pavilion Park, and out upon the splendid pier where the band played until ten o’clock, always concluding, as do all British bands, the world around, with “God save the Queen.” Boy, attended by the devoted Invaluable, divided the day between donkey-rides, playing in the sand,—getting wet through regularly twice per diem, by an in-rolling wave,—and the Aquarium. The latter resort was much affected by us all. It is of itself worth far more than the trouble and cost of a trip from London to Brighton and back.
The restfulness,—the indolence, if you will have it so—of that sojourn in a place where there were few “sights,” and when it was too warm to make a business of visiting such as there were, was a salutary break,—barring the influenza—in our tour. Perhaps our mental digestions are feebler or slower than those of the majority of traveling Americans. But it was a positive necessity for us to be quiet, now and then, for a week or a month, that the work of assimilation and nourishment might progress safely and healthfully. After a score of attempts to bolt an art-gallery, a museum, a cathedral, or a city at one meal, and to follow this up by rapidly successive surfeits, we learned wisdom from the dyspeptic horrors that ensued, and resigned the experiment to others. Nor did we squander time and strength upon a thing to which we were indifferent, merely because Murray or Baedeker prescribed it, or through fear of that social nuisance, the Thorough Traveler. We cultivated a fine obtuseness to the attacks of this personage and never lost an hour’s sleep for his assurance that the one thing worth seeing in Munich was the faïence in a tumbling-down palace only known to virtuosos “who understood the ropes,” and which we, being simple folk unversed in rope-pulling, had not beheld; or that he who omitted to walk the entire length of the Liverpool Docks, or to see the Giant’s Causeway by moonlight, or to go into the Blue Grotto, might better have stayed at home and given his ticket and letter-of-credit to a more appreciative voyager.
Our fortnight at Brighton, then, was one of our resting-spells, and one morning, after a night-shower had freshened the atmosphere, and the wind blew steadily but not too strongly from the sea, we drove, en famille, to the Downs and the Devil’s Dyke, a deep ravine cleaving the Downs into two hills. The devil’s name is a pretty sure guarantee of the picturesque or awful in scenery,—a sort of trade-mark. Our course was through the open, breezy country; the road, fringed and frilled with milk-white daisies and scarlet poppies, overlooking the ocean on one side, bounded upon the other by corn-fields and verdant downs stretching up and afar into the hilly horizon. The evenness of the grass upon these rolling heights, and of the growth of wheat and oats was remarkable, betokening uniformity of fertility and culture unknown in our country. Wheat, oats, barley—all bearded cereals—are “corn” abroad, maize being little known.
Leaving the waggonette at the hotel on the top of the Downs, and turning a deaf ear to the charming of the photographer, whose camera and black cloth were already afield, early in the day as it was, we walked on the ridge for an hour. We trod the springy turf as upon a flowery carpet; the air was balm and cordial; from our height we surveyed five of the richest counties of England, seeming to be spread upon a plane surface, the distance leveling minor inequalities. Sussex, Surrey, and Hampshire were a mottled map below our plateau, a string of hamlets marking highways and knotting up, once in a while, into a larger settlement wound about a church. Some of these were very primitive sanctuaries, with thatched roofs and towers, and the straw gables of the cottages were like so many embrowned hay-ricks.
Then and there, our feet deep in wild thyme and a hundred unknown blossoming grasses, the pastoral panorama unrolled for our vision, from the deep blue sea-line to the faint boundary of the far-off hills, the scented breezes filling lungs that panted to inhale yet larger draughts of their cool spiciness—we first heard the larks sing! We had been sceptical about the sky-lark. And since hearing the musical “jug-jug” and broken cadenzas of Italian nightingales, and deciding that the mocking-bird would be a triumphantly-successful rival could he be induced to give moonlight concerts, we had waxed yet more contemptuous of the bird who builds upon the ground, yet is fabled to sing at heaven’s gate. We had seen imported larks, brown, spiritless things, pecking in a home-sickly way at a bit of turf in the corner of their cage, and emitting an infrequent “tweet.” Our hedge-sparrow is a comelier and more interesting bird, and, for all we could see, might sing as well, if he would but apply his mind to the study of the sustained warble.
Our dear friend, Dr. V——, of Rome, once gave me a description of the serenades of the nightingales about his summer home on the Albanian Hills, so exquisite in wording, so pulsing with natural poetry as to transcend the song of any Philomel we ever listened to. I wished for him on the Downs that fervid July morning. I wish for his facile pen the more now when I would tell, and cannot, how the sky-larks sang and with what emotions we hearkened to them. They arose, not singly or in pairs, but by the score, from the expanse of enameled turf, mounting straight and slowly heavenward. Their notes blended in the upper air into a vibrating ecstasy of music. Pure as the odor of the thyme, free as the rush of the sea-air over the heights, warble and trill floated down to us as they soared, always directly up, up, until literally invisible to the naked eye. I brought the field-glass to bear upon two I had thus lost, and saw them sporting in the ether like butterflies, springing and sinking, tossing over and over upon the waves of their own melody, and, all the while, the lower air in which we stood was thrilling as clearly and deliciously with rapturous rivulets of sound as when they were scarce twenty feet above the earth.
Our last memory of Oxford is a landscape—in drawing, graphic and clear as a Millais, rich and mellow as a Claude in coloring. We brought away both picture and poem from Brighton Downs.
It was still summer-time, but summer with a presage of autumn in russet fields and shortening twilights, when we left the railway train at Slough, a station near Windsor Castle, and took a carriage for Stoke-Pogis. This, the “Country Church-yard” of Thomas Gray, is but two and a half miles from the railway, and is gained by a good road winding between hedge-rows and coppices, with frequent views of quiet country homes. The flag flaunting from the highest tower of Windsor was seldom out of sight on the route.