[Footnote 46: Since then become part of the Brantwood estate.] Coming down from the moor after the round, when you reach the front door you must see the performance of the waterfall: everybody must see that. On the moor a reservoir has been dug and dammed, with ingenious flood-gates--Ruskin's device, of course--and a channel led down through the wood to a rustic bridge in the rock. Some one has stayed behind to let out the water, and down it comes; first a black stream and then a white one, as it gradually clears; and the rocky wall at the entrance becomes for ten minutes a cascade. This too has it uses; not only is there a supply of water in case of fire (the exact utilisation of which is yet undecided), but it illustrates one of his doctrines about the simplicity with which works of irrigation could be carried out among the hills of Italy. And so you go in to tea and chess, for he loves a good game of chess with all his heart. He loves many things, you have found. He is different from other men you know, by the breadth and vividness of his sympathies, by power of living as few other men can live, in Admiration, Hope and Love. CHAPTER VII "FORS" RESUMED (1880-1881) Retirement at Brantwood was only partial. Ruskin's habits of life made it impossible for him to be idle, much as he acknowledged the need of thorough rest. He could not be wholly ignorant of the world outside Coniston; though sometimes for weeks together he tried to ignore it, and refused to read a newspaper. The time when General Gordon went out to Khartoum was one of these periods of abstraction, devoted to mediæval study. Somebody talked one morning at breakfast about the Soudan. "And who _is_ the Soudan?" he earnestly inquired, connecting the name, as it seemed, with the Soldan of Babylon, in crusading romance. "Don't you know," he wrote to a friend (January 8th, 1880): "That I am entirely with you in this Irish misery, and have been these thirty years?--only one can't speak plain without distinctly becoming a leader of Revolution? I know that Revolution _must come_ in all the world--but I can't act with Dan ton or Robespierre, nor with the modern French Republican or Italian one. I _could_ with you and your Irish, but you are only at the beginning of the end. I have spoken,--and plainly too,--for all who have ears, and hear."