X. CROSSMOUNT 427

making giddy water-parties lose their presence of mind if any such chance take them unawares. And (to get this needful bit of brag, and others connected with it, out of the way at once), I have to say that half my power of ascertaining facts of any kind connected with the arts, is in my stern habit of doing the thing with my own hands till I know its difficulty; and though I have no time nor wish to acquire showy skill in anything, I make myself clear as to what the skill means, and is. Thus, when I had to direct road-making at Oxford, I sate, myself, with an iron-masked stone-breaker, on his heap, to break stones beside the London road, just under Iffley Hill, till I knew how to advise my too impetuous pupils to effect their purposes in that matter, instead of breaking the heads of their hammers off, (a serious item in our daily expenses).¹ I learned from an Irish street crossing-sweeper what he could teach me of sweeping; but found myself in that matter nearly his match, from my boy-gardening; and again and again I swept bits of St. Giles’ foot-pavements, showing my corps of subordinates how to finish into depths of gutter. I worked with a carpenter until I could take an even shaving six feet long off a board; and painted enough with properly and delightfully soppy green paint to feel the master’s superiority in the use of a blunt brush. But among all these and other such studentships, the reader will be surprised, I think, to hear, seriously, that the instrument I finally decided to be the most difficult of management was the trowel. For accumulated months of my boy’s life I watched bricklaying and paving;* but when I took the trowel into my own hand, abandoned at once

* Of our paviour friends, Mr. and Mrs. Duprez (we always spelt and pronounced Depree), of Langley, near Slough, and Gray’s Inn (pronounced Grazen) Lane, in London (see the seventh number of Dilecta²). The laying of the proper quantity of sand under the pavement stones being a piece of trowel-handling as subtle as spreading the mortar under a brick.

¹ [For details of Ruskin’s Hincksey diggings, see Vol. XX. pp. xli. seq.; and for his squad of crossing-sweepers, Vol. XXVIII. pp. xvi., 204.]

² [This, however, was never reached.]

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