By about half-past ten his day is over; a busy day, that has left him tired out.  You will not easily forget the way he lit his candle—­no lamps allowed, and no gas—­and gave a last look lovingly at a pet picture or two, slanting his candlestick and shading the light with his hand, before he went slowly upstairs to his own little room, literally lined with the Turner drawings you have read about in “Modern Painters.”

You may be waked by a knock at the door, and “Are you looking out?” And pulling up the blind, there is one of our Coniston mornings, with the whole range of mountains in one quiet glow above the cool mist of the valley and lake.  Going down at length on a voyage of exploration, and turning in perhaps at the first door, you intrude upon “the Professor” at work in his study, half sitting, half kneeling at his round table in the bay window, with the early cup of coffee, and the cat in his crimson arm-chair.  There he has been working since dawn, perhaps, or on dark mornings by candlelight.  And he does not seem to mind the interruption; after a welcome he asks you to look round while he finishes his paragraph, and writes away composedly.

A long, low room, evidently two old cottage-rooms thrown into one; papered with a pattern specially copied from Marco Marziale’s “Circumcision” in the National Gallery; and hung with Turners.  A great early Turner[44] of the Lake of Geneva is over the fireplace.  You are tempted to make a mental inventory.  Polished steel fender, very unaesthetic; curious shovel—­his design, he will stop to remark, and forged by the village smith.  Red mahogany furniture, with startling shiny emerald leather chair-cushions; red carpet and green curtains.  Most of the room crowded with bookcases and cabinets for minerals.  Scales in a glass case; heaps of mineral specimens; books on the floor; rolls of diagrams; early Greek pots from Cyprus; a great litter of things and yet not disorderly nor dusty.  “I don’t understand,” he once said, “why you ladies are always complaining about the dust; my bookcases are never dusty!” The truth being that, though he rose early, the housemaid rose earlier.

[Footnote 44:  Since sold, and replaced by a della Robbia Madonna.]

Before you have finished your inventory he breaks off work to show you a drawer or two of minerals, fairy-land in a cupboard; or some of his missals, King Hakon’s Bible, or the original MS. of the Scott he was reading last night; or, opening a door in a sort of secretaire, pulls out of their sliding cases frame after frame of Turners—­the Bridge of Narni, the Falls of Terni, Florence, or Rome, and many more—­to hold in your hand, and take to the light, and look into with a lens—­quite a different thing from seeing pictures in a gallery.