One battue was enough for him, and the rest of the visit was spent in morbid despondency, digging thistles, and brooding over the significance of the curse of Eden, so strangely now interwoven with his own life--"Thorns a also and Thistles." At Bower's Well, Perth, where his grandparents had spent their later years, and where his parents had been married, lived Mr.George Gray, a lawyer, and an old acquaintance of the Ruskin family.

His daughter Euphemia used to visit at Denmark Hill.

It was for her that, some years earlier, "The King of the Golden River" had been written.

She had grown up into a perfect Scotch beauty, with every gift of health and spirits which would compensate--the old folk thought--for his retiring and morbid nature.

They were anxious, now more than ever, to see him settled.