ortant point! I will not stay here to see you
finish that study." And the next day we packed up and left for Geneva.

At Lausanne I made some careful architectural drawings, which he
praised,--some pencil sketches on the lake; and then we drove across
country to Freiburg, and finally to Neuchatel, where I found a
magnificent subject in the view from the hill behind the city, looking
over the lake towards the Alps, with Mont Blanc and the Bernese Alps
in the extreme distance. In the near distance rise the castle and
its old church, which Ruskin drew for me in pencil with exquisite
refinement of detail, for in this kind of drawing he was most
admirable. As we should stay only a few days, I could not paint
anything, and spent all my time, working nine hours a day, hard, on
the one subject in pencil. We still spent our evenings till late in
discussions and arguments, with a little chess, rarely going to bed
before midnight; and the steady strain, with my anxiety to lose none
of my time and opportunities, finally told on my eyes. One day, while
working hard on the view of Neuchatel, I felt something snap behind
my eyes, and in a few minutes I could no longer see my drawing;
the slightest attempt to fix my vision on anything caused such
indistinctness that I could see neither my work nor the landscape, and
I was obliged to suspend work altogether. In a few days we went to
Basle, and, after a rest, my vision came back partially, and we went
to Laufenburg, where Turner had found the subject for one of his
Liber Studiorum engravings. Here the subjects were entirely after my
feeling, and, as my eyes had ceased to trouble me, I set to work on a
large drawing of the town and fall from below. In the midst of it the
snapping behind my eyes came back, worse than ever, and that time not
to leave me for a long time. It was followed by an incessant headache,
which made life a burden, with obstinate indigestion. Here Ruskin
suddenly found that he must go back to England, and I returned with
him as far as Geneva, and thence went to St. Martin, where I spent the
rest of the autumn, as helpless for all work as a blind man.

My summer with Ruskin, to which I had looked for so much profit to my
art, had ended in a catastrophe of which I did not then even measure
the extent. It was nearly two years before I recovered from the attack
at Neuchatel enough to work regularly, and these circumstances threw
me still further from my chosen career. Mor