16 PRÆTERITA-I

the water-carts were filled through beautiful little trapdoors, by pipes like boa-constrictors; and I was never weary of contemplating that mystery, and the delicious dripping consequent);¹ and as years went on, and I came to be four or five years old, he could command a postchaise and pair for two months in the summer, by help of which, with my mother and me, he went the round of his country customers (who liked to see the principal of the house his own traveller); so that, at a jog-trot pace, and through the panoramic opening of the four windows of a post-chaise, made more panoramic still to me because my seat was a little bracket in front, (for we used to hire the chaise regularly for the two months out of Long Acre, and so could have it bracketed and pocketed as we liked,) I saw all the high-roads, and most of the cross ones, of England and Wales; and great part of lowland Scotland, as far as Perth, where every other year we spent the whole summer: and I used to read the Abbot at Kinross, and the Monastery in Glen Farg, which I confused with “Glendearg,” and thought that the White Lady had as certainly lived by the streamlet in that glen of the Ochils, as the Queen of Scots in the island of Loch Leven.²

6. To my farther great benefit, as I grew older, I thus saw nearly all the noblemen’s houses in England; in reverent and healthy delight of uncovetous admiration,-perceiving, as soon as I could perceive any political truth at all, that it was probably much happier to live in a small house, and have Warwick Castle to be astonished at, than to live in Warwick Castle and have nothing to be astonished at;³ but that, at all events, it would not make Brunswick Square in the least more pleasantly habitable, to pull Warwick Castle down. And at this day, though

¹ [Some further reminiscences of the “occupations of an exciting character in Hunter Street” are given in a passage of Fors, not embodied in Præterita: see Letter 53, § 1 (Vol. XXVIII. pp. 316-317).]

² [For another notice of these journeys, and the impressions left by them, see “Mending the Sieve,” § 1 (Vol. XXXIII. pp. 227-228).]

³ [For a reference to this passage, see Ruskin’s letter on Warwick Castle in Arrows of the Chace: Vol. XXXIV. p. 506.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]