“CHELSEA, 22 Feby, 1865

     “DEAR RUSKIN,

     “You have sent me a munificent Box of Cigars; for wh’h what can I
     say in ans’r?  It makes me both sad and glad. Ay de mi.

    “We are such stuff,
    Gone with a puff—­Then
    think, and smoke Tobacco!’

     “The Wife also has had her Flowers; and a letter wh’h has charmed
     the female mind.  You forgot only the first chapter of
     ’Aglaia’;—­don’t forget; and be a good boy for the future.

“The Geology Book wasn’t Jukes; I found it again in the Magazine,—­reviewed there:  ’Phillips,’[9] is there such a name?  It has ag’n escaped me.  I have a notion to come out actually some day soon; and take a serious Lecture from you on what you really know, and can give me some intelligible outline of, ab’t the Rocks,—­bones of our poor old Mother; wh’h have always been venerable and strange to me.  Next to nothing of rational could I ever learn of the subject....

     [Footnote 9:  “Jukes,”—­Mr. J.B.  Jukes, F.R.S., with whom Ruskin had
     been discussing in The Reader.  “Phillips,” the Oxford Professor
     of Geology, and a friend of Ruskin’s.]

     “Yours ever,

     “T.  CARLYLE.”

CHAPTER IV

“SESAME AND LILIES” (1864)

Wider aims and weaker health had not put an end to Ruskin’s connection with the Working Men’s College, though he did not now teach a drawing-class regularly.  He had, as he said, “the satisfaction of knowing that they had very good masters in Messrs. Lowes Dickinson, Jeffery and Cave Thomas,” and his work was elsewhere.  He was to have lectured there on December 19th, 1863; but he did not reach home until about Christmas; better than he had been; and ready to give the promised address on January 30th, 1864.  Beside which he used to visit the place occasionally of an evening to take note of progress, and some of his pupils were now more directly under his care.

It was from one of these visits to the College, on February 27th, that he returned, past midnight, and found his father waiting up for him, to read some letters he had written.  Next morning the old man, close upon seventy-nine years of age, was struck with his last illness; and died on March 3rd.  He was buried at Shirley Church, near Addington, in Surrey, not far from Croydon; and the legend on his tomb records:  “He was an entirely honest merchant, and his memory is, to all who keep it, dear and helpful.  His son, whom he loved to the uttermost, and taught to speak truth, says this of him.”