428 PRÆTERITA-II

all hope of attaining the least real skill with it, unless I gave up all thoughts of any future literary or political career. But the quite happiest bit of manual work I ever did was for my mother in the old inn at Sixt,¹ where she alleged the stone staircase to have become unpleasantly dirty, since last year. Nobody in the inn appearing to think it possible to wash it, I brought the necessary buckets of water from the yard myself, poured them into beautiful image of Versailles waterworks down the fifteen or twenty steps of the great staircase, and with the strongest broom I could find, cleaned every step into its corners. It was quite lovely work to dash the water and drive the mud, from each, with accumulating splash down to the next one.

198. I must return for a moment to the clumps of pine at Crossmount, and their company of owls, because-whatever wise people may say of them-I at least myself have found the owl’s cry always prophetic of mischief to me; and though I got wiser, as aforesaid, in my field of thistles, yet the Scottish Athena put on against me at that time her closed visor (not that Greek helmets ever have a visor, but when Athena hides her face, she throws her casque forward and down, and only looks through the oval apertures of it). Her adversity to me at this time was shown by my loss of Miss Lockhart, whom I saw for the last time at one of Lady Davy’s dinners, where Mr. Hope-Scott took the foot of the table. Lady Davy had given me Miss Lockhart to take down, but I found she didn’t care for a word I said; and Mr. Gladstone was on the other side of her-and the precious moments were all thrown away in quarrelling across her, with him, about Neapolitan prisons.* He couldn’t see, as I did, that the real prisoners were the people outside.

* Ante, § 51 [p. 289.]

¹ [See below, § 203 (p. 433). where Ruskin places the incident at the neighbouring village of Samoens. Compare Sesame and Lilies, § 138 (Vol. XVIII. p. 184): “I have myself washed a flight of stone stairs all down, with bucket and broom, in a Savoy inn, where they hadn’t washed their stairs since they first went up them; and I never made a better sketch than that afternoon.”]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]