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and a porter’s lodge, where undesirable visitors could be stopped before startling us with a knock. But, for all these things, we never were so happy again. Never any more “at home.”

81. At Champagnole, yes; and in Chamouni,-in La Cloche, at Dijon,-in Le Cygne, at Lucerne. All these places were of the old time. But though we had many happy days in the Denmark Hill house, none of our new ways ever were the same to us as the old: the basketfuls of peaches had not the flavour of the numbered dozen or score; nor were all the apples of the great orchard worth a single dishful of the Siberian crabs of Herne Hill.

And I never got my canal dug, after all! Harry’s making the lock-gates himself had indeed always seemed to me too magnificent! inimitable if not incredible: but also, I had never, till now that the need came, entered into the statistics of water supply. The gardeners wanted all that was in the butts for the greenhouse. Nothing but a dry ditch, incommodious to the cows, I saw to be possible, and resigned myself to destiny: yet the bewitching idea never went out of my head, and some water-works, on the model of Fontainebleau, were verily set aflowing-twenty years afterwards, as will be told.*

82. The next year, there was travelling enough for us up and down the new garden walks. Also, the first volume of Modern Painters took the best of the winter’s leisure: the summer was broken by some formal term-keeping at Oxford. There is nothing in diary worth noting, except a word about Camberwell church window, to which I must return in connection with things yet far ahead.¹

The said first volume must have been out by my father’s birthday; its success was assured by the end of the year, and on January 1st, 1844, “my father brought me in the ‘Slaver’ for a New Year’s gift,”-knowing well, this time,

* See “Joanna’s Care” [below, p. 560].

¹ [See below, pp. 382-383.]

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