ch off this page, as enclosed, would look better? The type is
very nice. How delicious a bit of Miss Edgeworth's is, like this!" "Ida"
was another page of his choice, and greatly approved. His title pages,
too, were arranged with great care; he used to draw them out in pen and
ink, indicating the size and position of the lines and letters. He
objected to ornaments and to anything like blackness and heaviness, but
he was very particular about proportions and spacing, and about the
division of words.

In the morning everybody is busy. There are drawings and diagrams to be
made, MS. to copy, references to look up, parcels to pack and unpack.
Someone is told off to take you round, and you visit the various rooms
and see the treasures, inspect the outhouse with its workshop for
carpentry, framing and mounting, casting leaves and modelling; one work
or another is sure to be going on; perhaps one of the various sculptors
who have made Ruskin's bust is busy there. Down at the Lodge, a
miniature Brantwood, turret and all, the Severn children live when they
are at Coniston. Then there are the gardens, terraced in the steep,
rocky slope, and some small hot-houses, which Ruskin thinks a
superfluity, except that they provide grapes for sick neighbours.

Below the gardens a path across a field takes you to the harbour, begun
in play by the Xenophon translators and finished by the village mason,
with its fleet of boats--chief of them the "Jumping Jenny" (called after
Nanty Ewart's boat in "Redgauntlet"), Ruskin's own design and special
private water-carriage. Outside the harbour the sail-boats are moored,
Mr. Severn's _Lily of Brantwood_. Milliard's boat, and his _Snail_, an
unfortunate craft brought from Morecambe Bay with great expectations
that were never realized; though Ruskin always professed to believe in
her, as a _real sea-boat_ (see "Harbours of England") such as he used to
steer with his friend Huret, the Boulogne fisherman, in the days when
he, too, was smitten with sea-fever.

After luncheon, if letters are done, all hands are piped to the moor.
With billhooks and choppers the party winds up the wood paths, "the
Professor" first, walking slowly, and pointing out to you his pet bits
of rock-cleavage, or ivied trunk, or nest of wild strawberry plants. You
see, perhaps, the ice-house--tunnelled at vast expense into the rock and
filled at more expense with the best ice; opened at last with great
expectations and the most ch