XI. CHRIST CHURCH CHOIR 199

me, except poor little Shepherdess Agnes’s picture of the “Duckling Astray.”¹

226. I count it is just a little to my credit that I was not ashamed, but pleased, that my mother came to Oxford with me to take such care of me as she could. Through all three years of residence, during term time, she had lodging in the High Street (first in Mr. Adams’s pretty house of sixteenth-century wood-work²), and my father lived alone all through the week at Herne Hill, parting with wife and son at once for the son’s sake. On the Saturday, he came down to us, and I went with him and my mother, in the old domestic way, to St. Peter’s, for the Sunday morning service: otherwise, they never appeared with me in public, lest my companions should laugh at me, or any one else ask malicious questions concerning vintner papa and his old-fashioned wife.

None of the men, through my whole college career, ever said one word in depreciation of either of them, or in sarcasm at my habitually spending my evenings with my mother. But once, when Adèle’s elder sister came with her husband to see Oxford, and I mentioned, somewhat unnecessarily, at dinner, that she was the Countess Diane de Maison, they had no mercy on me for a month afterwards.

The reader will please also note that my mother did not come to Oxford because she could not part with me,-

¹ [See Fors Clavigera, Letter 50 (Vol. XXVIII. p. 257). The MS. here adds:-

“And here I am partly tempted, and partly urged by a sense of duty, to digress into a treatise on what I might have made of the University if I had known better, or what it might have made of me, if it had known better. Resisting both impulse, and consciousness of philosophical power, I pursue my relation of what it did make of me, and I of myself. It is, I think, a little to my credit ...”

Some pages of such a treatise will be found partly in passages now added in the Appendix (below, pp. 610-614); partly in a letter to the Rev. W. L. Brown in the next volume.]

² [The MS. adds: “Of our one chief sitting-room, in which my outline drawing, still extant, gives excellent idea.” The drawing is here reproduced (Plate XI.). The rooms are at 90 High Street, a house formerly in possession of Christ Church, and now occupied by University College. Ruskin’s sketch, which must have been made on the floor, magnifies the height, but is otherwise true to the panelled and ceiled room, as it still exists (1908).]

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