This bridge leads over into the transpontine suburb, above which, on the slopes of Kinnoul Hill, the rank and fashion of the city have inclined to seek “eligible building sites,” _Scotticè_, “feuing plots.” The banks of the river, too, on this side have long been bordered by villas and cottages of gentility; but about “Bridge End” there is still a fragment of the humbler suburb that has had more than one famous sojourner in our time. Here, in a house now distinguished by a tablet, and afterwards in Rose Terrace opposite, John Ruskin spent bits of his childhood with an aunt, wife of the tanner whose unsavoury business had the credit of keeping the cholera away from Bridge End. That amateur of beauty, for his part, has nothing but good to say of Perth: he remembers with pleasure the precipices of Kinnoul, the swirling pools of the “Goddess-river,” even the humble “Lead,” in which other less gifted children have found “a treasure of flowing diamond,” now covered up to belie his vision of its defilement; and his lifelong impression was that “Scottish sheaves are more golden than are bound in other lands, and that no harvests elsewhere visible to human eyes are so like the ‘corn of heaven’ as those of Strath Tay and Strath-Earn.” Yet youthful gladness turned to pain, when through his connection with Perth Ruskin came to make that ill-matched marriage with its fairest maid, afterwards known as Lady Millais. Their brief union he passes over in silence in his else most communicative reminiscences; and the writer were indiscreet indeed who should revive rumours spun round a case of hopeless incompatibility. One misty legend, probably untrue, declares him, for certain reasons, to have vowed never to enter the house in which her family lived, that Bowerswell mansion, a little up the hill, where a crystal spring had often arrested his childish attention. He did enter the house once, to be married, according to the custom of the bride’s Presbyterian Church: _hinc illae lacrimae_, according to the legend.