nd of course Buckland, are as
kind to me as men can be; but I am tormented by the perpetual sense
of my unmitigated ignorance, for I know no more now than I did when
a boy, and I have only one perpetual feeling of being in
everybody's way. The recollections of the place, too, and the being
in my old rooms, make me very miserable. I have not one moment of
profitably spent time to look back to while I was here, and much
useless labour and disappointed hope; and I can neither bear the
excitement of being in the society where the play of mind is
constant, and rolls _over_ me like heavy wheels, nor the pain of
being alone. I get away in the evenings into the hayfields about
Cumnor, and rest; but then my failing sight plagues me. I cannot
look at anything as I used to do, and the evening sky is covered
with swimming strings and eels. My best time is while I am in the
Section room, for though it is hot, and sometimes wearisome, yet I
have nothing to _say_,--little to do,--nothing to look at, and as
much as I like to hear."

He had to undergo a second disappointment in love; his health broke down
again, and he was sent to Leamington to his former doctor, Jephson, once
more a "consumptive" patient. Dieted into health, he went to Scotland
with a new-found friend, William Macdonald Macdonald of Crossmount. But
he had no taste for sport, and could make little use of his
opportunities for distraction and relaxation. One battue was enough for
him, and the rest of the visit was spent in morbid despondency, digging
thistles, and brooding over the significance of the curse of Eden, so
strangely now interwoven with his own life--"Thorns a also and
Thistles."

At Bower's Well, Perth, where his grandparents had spent their later
years, and where his parents had been married, lived Mr. George Gray, a
lawyer, and an old acquaintance of the Ruskin family. His daughter
Euphemia used to visit at Denmark Hill. It was for her that, some years
earlier, "The King of the Golden River" had been written. She had grown
up into a perfect Scotch beauty, with every gift of health and spirits
which would compensate--the old folk thought--for his retiring and
morbid nature. They were anxious, now more than ever, to see him
settled. They pressed him, in letters still extant, to propose. We have
seen how he was situated, and can understand how he persuaded himself
that fortune,