On account of Mr. Ruskin’s refusing at times to see visitors, reports have gone abroad that his mind was giving way.  Not so, for although he is seventy-four he is as serenely stubborn as he ever was.  His opposition to new inventions in machinery has not relaxed a single pulley’s turn.  You grant his premises and in his conclusions you will find that his belt never slips, and that his logic never jumps a cog.  His life is as regular and exact as the trains on the Great Western, and his days are more peaceful than ever before.  He has regular hours for writing, study, walking, reading, eating, and working out of doors, superintending the cultivation of his hundred acres.  He told me that he had not varied a half-hour in two years from a certain time of going to bed or getting up in the morning.  Although his form is bowed, this regularity of life has borne fruit in the rich russet of his complexion, the mild, clear eye, and the pleasure in living in spite of occasional pain, which you know the man feels.  His hair is thick and nearly white; the beard is now worn quite long and gives a patriarchal appearance to the fine face.

When we arose to take our leave, Mr. Ruskin took a white felt hat from the elk-antlers in the hallway and a stout stick from the corner, and offered to show us a nearer way back to the village.  We walked down a footpath through the tall grass to the lake, where he called our attention to various varieties of ferns that he had transplanted there.

We shook hands with the old gentleman and thanked him for the pleasure he had given us.  He was still examining the ferns when we lifted our hats and bade him good-day.

He evidently did not hear us, for I heard him mutter:  “I verily believe those miserable Cook’s tourists that were down here yesterday picked some of my ferns.”

WILLIAM E. GLADSTONE

As the aloe is said to flower only once in a hundred years, so it seems to be but once in a thousand years that Nature blossoms into this unrivaled product and produces such a man as we have here.

    —­Gladstone, “Lecture on Homer”

[Illustration:  William E. Gladstone]

American travelers in England are said to accumulate sometimes large and unique assortments of lisps, drawls and other very peculiar things.  Of the value of these acquirements as regards their use and beauty, I have not room here to speak.  But there is one adjunct which England has that we positively need, and that is “Boots.”  It may be that Boots is indigenous to England’s soil, and that when transplanted he withers and dies; perhaps there is a quality in our atmosphere that kills him.  Anyway, we have no Boots.