Perhaps you may be surprised at my talking of labour and the workman.  You have heard of me, I fear, through the medium of your somewhat imaginative newspapers as, if not a ‘Japanese young man,’ at least a young man to whom the rush and clamour and reality of the modern world were distasteful, and whose greatest difficulty in life was the difficulty of living up to the level of his blue china—­a paradox from which England has not yet recovered.

Well, let me tell you how it first came to me at all to create an artistic movement in England, a movement to show the rich what beautiful things they might enjoy and the poor what beautiful things they might create.

One summer afternoon in Oxford—­’that sweet city with her dreaming spires,’ lovely as Venice in its splendour, noble in its learning as Rome, down the long High Street that winds from tower to tower, past silent cloister and stately gateway, till it reaches that long, grey seven-arched bridge which Saint Mary used to guard (used to, I say, because they are now pulling it down to build a tramway and a light cast-iron bridge in its place, desecrating the loveliest city in England)—­well, we were coming down the street—­a troop of young men, some of them like myself only nineteen, going to river or tennis-court or cricket-field—­when Ruskin going up to lecture in cap and gown met us.  He seemed troubled and prayed us to go back with him to his lecture, which a few of us did, and there he spoke to us not on art this time but on life, saying that it seemed to him to be wrong that all the best physique and strength of the young men in England should be spent aimlessly on cricket-ground or river, without any result at all except that if one rowed well one got a pewter-pot, and if one made a good score, a cane-handled bat.  He thought, he said, that we should be working at something that would do good to other people, at something by which we might show that in all labour there was something noble.  Well, we were a good deal moved, and said we would do anything he wished.  So he went out round Oxford and found two villages, Upper and Lower Hinksey, and between them there lay a great swamp, so that the villagers could not pass from one to the other without many miles of a round.  And when we came back in winter he asked us to help him to make a road across this morass for these village people to use.  So out we went, day after day, and learned how to lay levels and to break stones, and to wheel barrows along a plank—­a very difficult thing to do.  And Ruskin worked with us in the mist and rain and mud of an Oxford winter, and our friends and our enemies came out and mocked us from the bank.  We did not mind it much then, and we did not mind it afterwards at all, but worked away for two months at our road.  And what became of the road?  Well, like a bad lecture it ended abruptly—­in the middle of the swamp.  Ruskin going away to Venice, when we came back for the next term there