rom the garden
terrace--but he would be disgusted at the shut in feeling of the
house, which is in fact as much shut in as our old Herne Hill one;
only to get the 'view' I have but to go as far down the garden as
to our old 'mulberry tree.' By the way there's a magnificent
mulberry tree, as big as a common walnut, covered with black and
red fruit on the other side of the road. Coutet and Allen are very
anxious to do all they can now that Crawley is away; and I don't
think I shall manage very badly," etc.

A little later he took in addition a cottage in which the Empress of
Russia had once stayed: it commanded a finer view than the larger house,
which has since been turned into a hotel (Hotel et Pension des
Glycines). This place was for some time the hermitage in which he wrote
his political economy. Of his lonely rambles he wrote later on:

"If I have a definite point to reach, and common work to do at
it--I take people--anybody--with me; but all my best _mental_ work
is necessarily done alone; whenever I wanted to think, in Savoy, I
used to leave Coutet at home. Constantly I have been alone on the
Glacier des Bois--and far among the loneliest aiguille recesses. I
found the path up the Brezon above Bonneville in a lonely walk one
Sunday; I saw the grandest view of the Alps of Savoy I ever
gained, on the 2nd of January, 1862, alone among the snow wreaths
on the summit of the Saleve. You need not fear for me on 'Langdale
Pikes' after that."

In September the second article appeared in _Fraser._ "Only a genius
like Mr. Ruskin could have produced such hopeless rubbish," says a
newspaper of the period. Far worse than any newspaper criticism was the
condemnation of Denmark Hill. His father, whose eyes had glistened over
early poems and prose eloquence, strongly disapproved of this heretical
economy. It was a bitter thing that his son should become prodigal of a
hardly earned reputation, and be pointed at for a fool. And it was
intensely painful for a son "who had never given his father a pang that
could be avoided," as old Mr. Ruskin had once written, to find his
father, with one foot in the grave, turning against him. In December the
third paper appeared. History repeated itself, and with the fourth paper
the heretic was gagged. A year after, his father died; and these
_Fraser_ articles were laid aside until the end of 1871, when th