, as far as vol. i. of "Modern Painters." To the adjoining house,
as his own separate home, he returned for a period of his middle life;
and in the old home, handed over to his adopted daughter, he still used
to find his own rooms ready when he cared to visit London.

So he was brought up almost as a country boy, though near enough to town
to get the benefit of it, and far enough from the more exciting scenes
of landscape nature to find them ever fresh, when summer after summer he
revisited the river scenery of the West or the mountains of the North.
For by a neat arrangement, and one fortunate for his education, the
summer tours were continued yearly. Mr. John James Ruskin still
travelled for the business, then greatly extending. "Strange," he writes
on one occasion, "that Watson [his right-hand man] went this journey
without getting one order, and everyone gives me an order directly." In
return for these services to the firm, Mr. Telford, the capitalist
partner, took the vacant chair at the office, and even lent his carriage
for the journeys. There was room for two, so Mrs. Ruskin accompanied her
husband, whose indifferent health gave her and his friends constant
anxiety during long separations. And the boy could easily be packed in,
sitting on his little portmanteau, and playing horses with his father's
knees; the nurse riding on the dickey behind.

They started usually after the great family anniversary, the father's
birthday, on May 10, and journeyed by easy stages through the South of
England, working up the west to the north, and then home by the
east-central route, zigzagging from one provincial town to another,
calling at the great country seats, to leave no customer or possible
customer unvisited; and in the intervals of business seeing all the
sights of the places they passed through--colleges and churches,
galleries and parks, ruins, castles, caves, lakes, and mountains--and
seeing them all, not listlessly, but with keen interest, noting
everything, inquiring for local information, looking up books of
reference, setting down the results, as if they had been meaning to
write a guide-book and gazetteer of Great Britain. _They_, I say, did
all this, for as soon as the boy could write, he was only imitating his
father in keeping his little journal of the tours, so that all he
learned stayed by him, and the habit of descriptive writing was formed.

In 1823 they seem to have travelled only through the south and