Motion Picture Story Magazine (Feb-Jul 1912)

114 THE MOTION PICTURE STORY MAGAZINE moon of his desires — reverenced but unattainable. At the age of nine he wrote verse as fluently as the average college-bred man, and when eighteen seasons had sobered still more the house on Heme Hill, he wrote a series of papers under the name of "Kata Phusin," for the Architectural Magazine, that made him the most talked about young man in England. As in all of his earlier writing, their purport was that religion, tempered by justness and right-living, is the soil of which the fine arts are but the fruitfulness. In his thirtieth year the ardent revolutionist — for everything he said or wrote startled the conceptions of those days — made a rambling tour into Perthshire. He was in ill health at the time, burnt out from the heat of overwork, and would lie awake on the moors of nights listening to the hooting of owls and sheep dogs whining across the hills. All this may have been conditioning his soul, as a knight's vigil in a deserted sanctuary, for the love which was about to come into it. Euphemia Gray was her name, and when she was a touseled golden-top, John had written her a long fairy-like letter, a blend of Grimm and Dickens, which was afterward published as "The King of the Golden River. ' ' The philosopher went about his wooing according to his crotchets — he was very shy, you must remember, and a certain summer day saw him installed in a roomy country house, with the view from its windows giving out upon the rose-covered cottage of the Grays. They were of excellent stock — the elderly father and his daughter — tho impoverished, and were wont t.o hold their heads as high, if not higher, than the Ruskins. Chalmers Gray had lost his grip on the busy world and was content with retirement, but Euphemia, witty, beautiful, high-spirited, burned with secret desires to live and conquer in London or at least in Edinburgh. John Ruskin's books followed him from Heme Hill, to be installed as part and parcel of his life, and then the singular courtship had a beginning. From the lozenge panes of his library window the Grays' cottage, in its little garden, stood in plain view. Here, every day, when the fever of close writing released him from its thrall, he would stand and gaze long and silently at his neighbors' affairs. Gray and his daughter lived much in the open, under a bower of roses, and she, dutiful girl, pandered to his every whim. First it would be a fetching of list slippers and a book, and while he read listlessly, she knitted furiously or culled flowers for a bowl. Then she must be near him, seated on the arm of his chair, petting and kissing, and rumpling his hair. Soon a better humor would come upon him, and they would fall to talking and laughing, with his hands upon her shoulders. All this and more that was pretty the scholar saw from behind the vantage of his window, and the more he saw the more he feasted. The rustic setting, with its unconscious actors, her soft, petting ways that acted like a tonic upon Chalmers Gray, the ripe corn color of her hair against the red roses, these things and his own intense hermit life turned his steps perhaps too often toward the dusty window, which, as the sun crept into it, and formed a patch upon his carpet, told him that his neighbors were at play. Perhaps he would have drawn pale consolement from thus seeing her daily at a distance, and as the summer waned would have withdrawn silently to London had not they, in some timidity at his fame, called upon him one day. Their families had long been as intimate as the slow-moving coaches and the newer railroads would permit. She had had a taste of the quieter side of London as a romping child, making a prolonged visit to the Ruskins, and tiptoeing thru the darkened halls of Heme Hill by the side of serious John. On her return had followed the fairy letter, writ in a spirit of mirth, and showing a glimpse of the glad and brilliant depths of the young man's heart.