“I was afterwards,” he says, “gifted with a two-arched bridge, admirable in fittings of voussoir and keystone, and adjustment of the level courses of masonry with bevelled edges, into which they dovetailed in the style of Waterloo Bridge. Well-made centrings, and a course of inlaid steps down to the water, made this model largely, as accurately, instructive: and I was never weary of building, _un_-building—(it was too strong to be thrown down, but had always to be _taken_ down)—and re-building it.” We know how he busied himself with making a small dam and reservoir at both the Herne Hill and Denmark Hill homes; and how, while still a boy, he scrubbed down, with pail of water and broom, the dirty steps of an Alpine hotel, because they offended his mother. We feel that in this direction, again, his nature cried aloud for opportunities. =Intimacy with Natural Objects.=—We do not hear much of the intimacy of either boy with _Natural Objects_, such as birds and flowers; but here, again, we feel that Ruskin was deprived of opportunity. His flower friends were garden dwellers; and could anything be more pathetic than this: “My chief prayer for the kindness of heaven, in its flowerful seasons, was that the frost might not touch the almond blossom.”[17] Wordsworth appears to have waited for his intimacy with wild-flowers until he could say of his sister Dorothy, “She gave me eyes, she gave me ears.” Birds, as we have seen, he knew through the wicked joy of birdsnesting; but not only so, that day when the wild cavalcade rode to Furness Abbey, he marked— “That simple wren Which one day sang so sweetly in the nave Of the old church, that.... I could have made My dwelling-place, and lived for ever there To hear such music.” =Ruskin’s Flower Studies.=—If Ruskin had not, as a child, a wide acquaintance with the flowers of the field, he made up, perhaps, by the enormous attention he gave to such as came in his way; and, just as his toy bricks and his bridge gave him his initiation in the principles of architecture, so, perhaps, his early flower studies resulted in his power of seeing and expressing detail. He says of flowers: “My whole time passed in staring at them or into them. In no morbid curiosity, but in admiring wonder, I pulled every flower to pieces till I knew all that could be seen of it with a child’s eyes; and used to lay up little treasures of seeds, by way of pearls and beads,—never with any thought of sowing them.” He complains that books on Botany were harder than the Latin Grammar.