"The house itself" (says Mr. Ruskin) "had every good in it, except nearness to a stream, that could with any reason be coveted by modest mortals. It stood in command of seven acres of healthy ground ... half of it in meadow sloping to the sunrise, the rest prudently and pleasantly divided into an upper and lower kitchen garden; a fruitful bit of orchard, and chance inlets and outlets of woodwalk, opening to the sunny path by the field, which was gladdened on its other side in springtime by flushes of almond and double peach blossom. Scarce all the hyacinths and heath of Brantwood redeem the loss of these to me; and when the summer winds have wrecked the wreaths of our wild roses, I am apt to think sorrowfully of the trailings and climbings of deep purple convolvulus which bloomed full every autumn morning round the trunks of the apple trees in the kitchen garden." That hedge of almond blossom is still gay in spring, and the "shabby tide of progress" has not touched the old house, which, garden, field, orchard and all, is still virtually the same as it was in Ruskin's time. No. 163, Denmark Hill, is its designation;--a big, roomy, detached mansion, a real "rus in urbe." Much like other large suburban villas, the house itself; yet this is the spot whence emanated _Modern Painters_, that early work of genius that assured the young writer's fame. There is the "study" that Mr. Ruskin used, his "workroom above the breakfast-room"; there, above it again, is his bedroom, looking straight south-east, giving "command of the morning clouds, inestimable for its aid in all healthy thought." There, still, is the little reservoir made by Mr. Ruskin in engineering zeal, a canal said by the neighbours to have cost £5 every time he had it filled, in vain attempt to make a little rivulet, or Alpine sluice, for watering! For, although "of age and a B.A.," the chief reason, as Mr. Ruskin ingenuously confesses, why his soul yearned for the Denmark Hill house, was, that "ever since I could drive a spade, I had wanted to dig a canal, and make locks on it, like Harry in "Harry and Lucy." And in the field at the back of the Denmark Hill house I saw my way to a canal with any number of locks down to Dulwich." ... "But," he adds sorrowfully, "I never got my canal dug, after all! The gardeners wanted all the water for the greenhouse. I resigned myself ... yet the bewitching idea never went out of my head, and some waterworks were verily set aflowing twenty years afterwards."