I finally found a subject which interested me in a view of the foot of the Mer de Glace from the opposite side of the river, looking up the glacier, with the bridge under the Brevent, and a cottage in the foreground, and set to work on it energetically.  Ruskin used to sit behind me and comment on my work.  My methods of painting were my own, for I had never painted under any one except the few months with Church, whose method had taught me nothing; and I had a way of painting scud clouds, such as always hang around the Alpine peaks, by brushing the sky in thinly with the sky-blue, and then working into that, with the brush, the melting clouds, producing the grays I wanted on the canvas.  It imitated the effect of nature logically, as the pigment imitated the mingling of the vapor with the blue sky; but Ruskin said this was incorrect, and that the colors must be laid like mosaic, side by side, in the true tint.  Another discouragement!  I used to lay in the whole subject, beginning with the sky, rapidly and broadly, and, when it was dry, returning to the foreground and finishing towards the distance; and Buskin was delighted with the foreground painting, insisting on my doing nothing further to it.  In the distance was the Montanvert and the Aiguille du Dru; but where the lines of the glacier and the slopes of the mountain at the right met, five nearly straight lines converged at a point far from the centre, and I did not see how to get rid of them without violating the topography.  I pointed it out to Ruskin, and he immediately exclaimed:  “Oh, nothing can he done with a subject like that, with five lines radiating from an unimportant 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.