Rogers' "Italy" that sent the family off to the Alps that summer; but,
fortunately for John, his father's eye was caught by the romantic
architecture of Prout's "Sketches in Flanders and Germany," when it came
out in April, 1853, and his mother proposed to make both of them happy
in a tour on the Continent. The business-round was abandoned, but they
could see Mr. Domecq on their way back through Paris, and not wholly
lose the time.

They waited to keep papa's birthday on May 10, and early next morning
drove off--father and mother, John and Mary, Nurse Anne, and the
courier Salvador. They crossed to Calais, and posted, as people did in
the old times, slowly from point to point; starting betimes, halting at
the roadside inns, where John tried to snatch a sketch, reaching their
destination early enough to investigate the cathedral or the citadel,
monuments of antiquity or achievements of modern civilisation, with
impartial eagerness; and before bedtime John would write up his journal
and work up his sketches just as if he were at home.

So they went through Flanders and Germany, following Prout's lead by the
castles of the Rhine; but at last, at Schaffhausen one Sunday
evening--"suddenly--behold--beyond!"--they had seen the Alps.
Thenceforward Turner was their guide as they crossed the Splügen, sailed
the Italian lakes, wondered at Milan Cathedral, and the Mediterranean at
Genoa, and then roamed through the Oberland and back to Chamouni. All
this while a great plan shaped itself in the boy's head, no less than to
make a Rogers' "Italy" for himself, just as he tried to make a "Harry
and Lucy" or a "Dictionary of Minerals." On every place they passed he
would write verses and prose sketches, to give respectively the romance
and the reality or ridicule; for he saw the comic side of it all,
keenly; and he would illustrate the series with Turneresque vignettes,