In the next year (1823) they quitted the town for a suburban home.  The spot they chose was in rural Dulwich, on Herne Hill, a long offshoot of the Surrey downs; low, and yet commanding green fields and scattered houses in the foreground, with rich undulating country to the south, and looking across London toward Windsor and Harrow.  It is all built up now; but their house (later No. 28) must have been as secluded as any in a country village.  There were ample gardens front and rear, well stocked with fruit and flowers—­quite an Eden for a little boy, and all the more that the fruit of it was forbidden.  It was here that all his years of youth were spent.  Here, under his parents’ roof, he wrote his earlier works, as far as vol. i. of “Modern Painters.”  To the adjoining house, as his own separate home, he returned for a period of his middle life; and in the old home, handed over to his adopted daughter, he still used to find his own rooms ready when he cared to visit London.

So he was brought up almost as a country boy, though near enough to town to get the benefit of it, and far enough from the more exciting scenes of landscape nature to find them ever fresh, when summer after summer he revisited the river scenery of the West or the mountains of the North.  For by a neat arrangement, and one fortunate for his education, the summer tours were continued yearly.  Mr. John James Ruskin still travelled for the business, then greatly extending.  “Strange,” he writes on one occasion, “that Watson [his right-hand man] went this journey without getting one order, and everyone gives me an order directly.”  In return for these services to the firm, Mr. Telford, the capitalist partner, took the vacant chair at the office, and even lent his carriage for the journeys.  There was room for two, so Mrs. Ruskin accompanied her husband, whose indifferent health gave her and his friends constant anxiety during long separations.  And the boy could easily be packed in, sitting on his little portmanteau, and playing horses with his father’s knees; the nurse riding on the dickey behind.

They started usually after the great family anniversary, the father’s birthday, on May 10, and journeyed by easy stages through the South of England, working up the west to the north, and then home by the east-central route, zigzagging from one provincial town to another, calling at the great country seats, to leave no customer or possible customer unvisited; and in the intervals of business seeing all the sights of the places they passed through—­colleges and churches, galleries and parks, ruins, castles, caves, lakes, and mountains—­and seeing them all, not listlessly, but with keen interest, noting everything, inquiring for local information, looking up books of reference, setting down the results, as if they had been meaning to write a guide-book and gazetteer of Great Britain. They, I say, did all this, for as soon as the boy could write, he was only imitating his father in keeping his little journal of the tours, so that all he learned stayed by him, and the habit of descriptive writing was formed.