groups of girls scattered round it, it is a quite beautiful scene
in its way. Their morning chapel, too, is very interesting:--though
only a large room, it is nicely fitted with reading desk and seats
like a college chapel, and two pretty and rich stained-glass
windows--and well-toned organ. They have morning prayers with only
one of the lessons--and without the psalms: but singing the Te Deum
or the other hymn--and other choral parts: and as out of the
thirty-five or forty girls perhaps twenty-five or thirty have
really available voices, well trained and divided, it was
infinitely more beautiful than any ordinary church service--like
the Trinita di Monte Convent service more than anything else, and
must be very good for them, quite different in its effect on their
minds from our wretched penance of college chapel.

"The house stands in a superb park, full of old trees and sloping
down to the river; with a steep bank of trees on the other side;
just the kind of thing Mrs. Sherwood likes to describe;--and the
girls look all healthy and happy as can be, down to the little
six-years-old ones, who I find know me by the fairy tale as the
others do by my large books:--so I am quite at home.

"They have my portrait in the library with three others--Maurice,
the Bp. of Oxford, and Archdeacon Hare,--so that I can't but stay
with them over the Sunday."

The principles of Winnington were advanced; the theology--Bishop
Colenso's daughter was among the pupils; the Bishop of Oxford had
introduced Ruskin to the managers, who were pleased to invite the
celebrated art-critic to visit whenever he travelled that way, whether
to lecture at provincial towns, or to see his friends in the north, as
he often used. And so between March 1859 and May 1868, after which the
school was removed, he was a frequent visitor; and not only he, but
other lions whom the ladies entrapped:--mention has been made in print
(in "The Queen of the Air") of Charles Halle, whom Ruskin met there in
1863, and greatly admired.

"I like Mr. and Mrs. Halle so very much," he wrote home, "and am
entirely glad to know so great a musician and evidently so good and
wise a man. He was very happy yesterday evening, and actually sat
down and played quadrilles for us to dance to--which is, in its
way, something like Titian sketching patterns for