VI. SCHAFFHAUSEN AND MILAN 105

till it became as reflective as a mahogany table,-with the pretty court full of flowers and shrubs in beds and tubs between our rez-de-chaussée windows and the outer gate,- with a nice black servant belonging to another family, who used to catch the house-cat for me; and with an equally good-natured fille de chambre, who used to catch it back again, for fear I should tease it, (her experience of English boy-children having made her dubious of my intentions);- all these things and people I remember,-and the Tuileries garden, and the “Tivoli” gardens, where my father took me up and down a “Russian mountain,” and I saw fireworks of the finest. But I remember nothing of the Seine, nor of Notre Dame, nor of anything in or even out of the town, except the windmills on Mont Martre.

121. Similarly at Brussels. I recollect no Hotel de Ville, no stately streets, no surprises, or interests, except only the drive to Waterloo and slow walk over the field. The defacing mound was not then built-it was only nine years since the fight; and each bank and hollow of the ground was still a true exponent of the courses of charge or recoil. Fastened in my mind by later reading,¹ that sight of the slope of battle remains to me entirely distinct, while the results of a later examination of it after the building of the mound, have faded mostly away.

I must also note that the rapture of getting on board a steamer, spoken of in last letter,² was of later date; as a child I cared more for a beach on which the waves broke, or sands in which I could dig, than for wide sea.³ There was no “first sight” of the sea for me. I had gone to Scotland in Captain Spinks’ cutter, then a regular passage boat, when I was only three years old; but the weather was fine, and except for the pleasure of tattooing myself with tar among the ropes, I might as well have been

¹ [See Vol. XXXI. p. 477, where Ruskin refers to his constant study of military history.]

² [See above, p. 94.]

³ [Compare Modern Painters, vol. ii. (Vol. IV. p. 79).]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]