sion" in the National Gallery; and hung with Turners. A great
early Turner[44] of the Lake of Geneva is over the fireplace. You are
tempted to make a mental inventory. Polished steel fender, very
unaesthetic; curious shovel--his design, he will stop to remark, and
forged by the village smith. Red mahogany furniture, with startling
shiny emerald leather chair-cushions; red carpet and green curtains.
Most of the room crowded with bookcases and cabinets for minerals.
Scales in a glass case; heaps of mineral specimens; books on the floor;
rolls of diagrams; early Greek pots from Cyprus; a great litter of
things and yet not disorderly nor dusty. "I don't understand," he once
said, "why you ladies are always complaining about the dust; my
bookcases are never dusty!" The truth being that, though he rose early,
the housemaid rose earlier.

[Footnote 44: Since sold, and replaced by a della Robbia Madonna.]

Before you have finished your inventory he breaks off work to show you a
drawer or two of minerals, fairy-land in a cupboard; or some of his
missals, King Hakon's Bible, or the original MS. of the Scott he was
reading last night; or, opening a door in a sort of secretaire, pulls
out of their sliding cases frame after frame of Turners--the Bridge of
Narni, the Falls of Terni, Florence, or Rome, and many more--to hold in
your hand, and take to the light, and look into with a lens--quite a
different thing from seeing pictures in a gallery.

At breakfast, when you see the post-bag brought in, you understand why
he tries to get his bit of writing done early. The letters and parcels
are piled in the study, and after breakfast, at which, as in old times,
he reads his last-written passages--how much more interesting they will
always look to you in print!--after breakfast he is closeted with an
assistant, and they work through the heap. Private friends, known by
handwriting, he puts aside; most of the morning will go in answering
them. Business he talks over, and gives brief directions. But the bulk
of the correspondence is from strangers in all parts of the
world--admirers' flattery; students' questions; begging-letters for
money, books, influence, advice, autographs, criticism on enclosed MS.
or accompanying picture; remonstrance or abuse from dissatisfied
readers, or people who object to his method of publication, or wish to
convert him to their own religion. And so the heap is gradually cleared,
with the help of the waste-paper