n's open and confessed
discipleship accepted and encouraged. This letter especially shows both
men in an unaccustomed light: Ruskin, hating tobacco, sends his "master"
cigars; Carlyle, hating cant, replies rather in the tone of the
temperance advocate, taking a little wine for his stomach's sake:

"CHELSEA, 22 _Feby_, 1865

"DEAR RUSKIN,

"You have sent me a munificent Box of Cigars; for wh'h what can I
say in ans'r? It makes me both sad and glad. _Ay de mi._

"We are such stuff,
Gone with a puff--Then
think, and smoke Tobacco!'

"The Wife also has had her Flowers; and a letter wh'h has charmed
the female mind. You forgot only the first chapter of
'Aglaia';--don't forget; and be a good boy for the future.

"The Geology Book wasn't _Jukes_; I found it again in the
Magazine,--reviewed there: 'Phillips,'[9] is there such a name? It
has ag'n escaped me. I have a notion to come out actually some day
soon; and take a serious Lecture from you on what you really know,
and can give me some intelligible outline of, ab't the
Rocks,--_bones_ of our poor old Mother; wh'h have always been
venerable and strange to me. Next to nothing of rational could I
ever learn of the subject....

[Footnote 9: "Jukes,"--Mr. J.B. Jukes, F.R.S., with whom Ruskin had
been discussing in _The Reader_. "Phillips," the Oxford Professor
of Geology, and a friend of Ruskin's.]

"Yours ever,

"T. CARLYLE."

CHAPTER IV

"SESAME AND LILIES" (1864)

Wider aims and weaker health had not put an end to Ruskin's connection
with the Working Men's College, though he did not now teach a
drawing-class regularly. He had, as he said, "the satisfaction of
knowing that they had very good masters in Messrs. Lowes Dickinson,
Jeffery and Cave Thomas," and his work was elsewhere. He was to have
lectured there on December 19th, 1863; but he did not reach home until
about Christmas; better than he had been; and ready to give the promised
address on January 30th, 1864. Beside which he used to visit the place
occasionally of an evening to take note of progress, and some of his
pupils were now more directly under his care.

It was from one of these visits to the College, on February 27th, that
he returned, past midnight, and found his father waiting up for him, to
read some letters he had written. Next morning the old man, close upon
seventy-ni