so much as lock the house-doors at night; and the faces of the older peasantry are really very beautiful.  I have done a good deal of botany, and find that wild-flower botany is more or less inexhaustible, but the cultivated flowers are infinite in their caprice.  The forget-me-nots and milkworts are singularly beautiful here, but there is quite as much variety in English fields as in these, as long as one does not climb much—­and I’m very lazy, compared to what I used to be,”

     “LAUTERBRUNNEN, 13th June, 1866.

“We had a lovely evening here yesterday, and the children enjoyed and understood it better than anything they have yet seen among the Alps.  Constance was in great glory in a little walk I took her in the twilight through the upper meadows:  the Staubbach seen only as a grey veil suspended from its rock, and the great Alps pale above on the dark sky.  She condescended nevertheless to gather a great bunch of the white catchfly,—­to make ‘pops’ with,—­her friend Marie at the Giesbach having shown her how a startling detonation may be obtained, by skilful management, out of its globular calyx.

“This morning is not so promising,—­one of the provoking ones which will neither let you stay at home with resignation, nor go anywhere with pleasure.  I’m going to take the children for a little quiet exploration of the Wengern path, to see how they like it, and if the weather betters—­we may go on.  At all events I hope to find an Alpine rose or two.”

In June, 1866, the Professorship of Poetry at Oxford was vacant; and Ruskin’s friends were anxious to see him take the post.  He, however, felt no especial fitness or inclination for it, and did not stand.  Three years later he was elected to a Professorship that at this time had not been founded.

After spending June in the Oberland, he went homewards through Berne, Vevey and Geneva, to find his private secretary with a bundle of begging letters, and his friend Carlyle busy with the defence of Governor Eyre.

In 1865 an insurrection of negroes at Morant Bay, Jamaica, had threatened to take the most serious shape, when it was stamped out by the high-handed measures of Mr. Eyre.  After the first congratulations were over another side to the question called for a hearing.  The Baptist missionaries declared that among the negroes who were shot and hanged in terrorem were peaceable subjects, respectable members of their own native congregations, for whose character they could vouch; they added that the gravity of the situation had been exaggerated by private enmity and jealousy of their work and creed.  A strong committee was formed under Liberal auspices, supported by such men as John Stuart Mill and Thomas Hughes, the author of “Tom Brown’s Schooldays”—­men whose motive was above suspicion—­to bring Mr. Eyre to account.