At Florence he met Mr. Henry Roderick Newman, an American artist who had been at Coniston and was working for the Guild.  He introduced Ruskin to Mrs. and Miss Alexander.  In these ladies’ home he found his own aims, in religion, philanthropy, and art, realised in an unexpected way.  Miss Alexander’s drawing at first struck him by its sincerity.  Not only did she draw beautifully, but she also wrote a beautiful hand; and it had been one of his old sayings that missal-writing, rather than missal-painting, was the admirable thing in mediaeval art.  The legends illustrated by her drawings were collected by herself, through an intimate acquaintance with Italians of all classes, from the nobles to the peasantry, whom she understood and loved, and by whom she was loved and understood.  By such intercourse she had learned to look beneath the surface.  In religious matters her American common-sense saw through her neighbours—­saw the good in them as well as the weakness—­and she was as friendly, not only in social intercourse, but in spiritual things, with the worthy village priest as with T.P.  Rossetti,[47] the leader of the Protestant “Brethren,” whom she called her pastor.  And Ruskin, who had been driven away from Protestantism by the poor Waldensian at Turin, and had wandered through many realms of doubt and voyaged through strange seas of thought, alone, found harbour at last with the disciple of a modern evangelist, the frequenter of the little meeting-house of outcast Italian Protestants.

[Footnote 47:  A cousin of the artist, and in his way no less remarkable a man.  A short account of his life is given in “D.G.  Rossetti, his family letters,” Vol.  I., p. 34.  The circumstances of his death are touchingly related by Miss Alexander in “Christ’s Folk; in the Apennine.”]

One evening before dinner he brought back to the hotel at Florence a drawing of a lovely girl lying dead in the sunset; and a little note-book.  “I want you to look over this,” he said, in the way, but not quite in the tone, with which the usual MS. “submitted for criticism” was tossed to a secretary to taste.  It was “The True Story of Ida; written by her Friend.”

An appointment to meet Mr. E.R.  Robson, who was making plans for an intended Sheffield museum, took him back to Lucca, to discuss Romanesque mouldings and marble facings.  Mr. Charles Fairfax Murray also came to Lucca with drawings commissioned for St. George’s Guild.  But Ruskin soon returned to his new friends, and did not leave Florence finally until he had purchased the wonderful collection of 110 drawings, with beautifully written text, in which Miss Alexander had enshrined “The Roadside Songs of Tuscany.”