Ruskin was walking the streets of London lamenting that not a shred of country life was left in them.

“For these streets are indeed what they have built; their inhabitants the people they have chosen to educate. 

This fermenting mass of unhappy human beings – news-mongers, novel-mongers, picture-mongers, poison-drink-mongers, lust and death-mongers; the whole smoking mass of it one vast dead-marine storeshop –accumulation wreck of the Dead Sea, with every activity in it, a form of putrefaction.”

To soothe and recover from his visit to the city of vanity, he consoles himself back in the country when he notices an old woman and her pig – 

“I got some peace and refreshment by mere sympathy with a Bewickian little pig in the roundest and conceitedest burst of pig-blossom. His servant, - a grave old woman, with much sorrow and toil in the wrinkles of her skin, while his was only dimpled in its divine thickness – was leading him, with magnanimous length of rope, down a grassy path behind the convent; stopping, of course, where he chose.

Stray stalks and leaves of eatable things, in various stages of ambrosial rottenness, lay here and there. The little joyful darling of Demeter shook his curly tail, and munched; and grunted the goodnaturedest of grunts, and snuffled the approving’s of snuffles, and was a balm and beautification to behold, and I would have fain have changed places with him for a little while….”  

He then shares his thoughts about his home on a mountain – 

“On my own little piece of mountain ground, I grow a large quantity of wood-hyacinths and heather, without any expense worth mentioning; 

but my only industrious agricultural operations 

have been the getting of three-pounds-ten worth of hay, 

off a field for which I pay six pounds rent, 

and surrounding with a costly wall six feet high, 

to keep out rabbits, which consider it a kitchen garden, 

which, being terraced and trim, my neighbors say is pretty; 

and which will probably, every third year, when the weather is not wet, supply me with a dish of strawberries.”