and I think I had better tell without further
delay of my boyhood and my early impressions in the shadow of Bladesover
House.

III

There came a time when I realised that Bladesover House was not all it
seemed, but when I was a little boy I took the place with the entirest
faith as a complete authentic microcosm. I believed that the Bladesover
system was a little working-model--and not so very little either--of the
whole world.

Let me try and give you the effect of it.

Bladesover lies up on the Kentish Downs, eight miles perhaps from
Ashborough; and its old pavilion, a little wooden parody of the temple
of Vesta at Tibur, upon the hill crest behind the house, commands in
theory at least a view of either sea, of the Channel southward and the
Thames to the northeast. The park is the second largest in Kent, finely
wooded with well-placed beeches, many elms and some sweet chestnuts,
abounding in little valleys and hollows of bracken, with springs and a
stream and three fine ponds and multitudes of fallow deer. The house was
built in the eighteenth century, it is of pale red brick in the style of
a French chateau, and save for one pass among the crests which opens to
blue distances, to minute, remote, oast-set farm-houses and copses
and wheat fields and the occasional gleam of water, its hundred
and seventeen windows look on nothing but its own wide and handsome
territories. A semi-circular screen of great beeches masks the church
and village, which cluster picturesquely about the high road along the
skirts of the great park. Northward, at the remotest corner of that
enclosure, is a second dependent village, Ropedean, less fortunate in
its greater distance and also on account of a rector. This divine
was indeed rich, but he was vindictively economical because of some
shrinkage of his tithes; and by reason of his use of the word Eucharist
for the Lord's Supper he had become altogether estranged from the great
ladies of Bladesover. So that Ropedean was in the shadows through all
that youthful time.

Now the unavoidable suggestion of that wide park and that fair large
house, dominating church, village and the country side, was that they
represented the thing that mattered supremely in the world, and that all
other things had significance only in relation to them. They represented
the Gentry, the Quality, by and through and for whom the rest of the
world, the farming folk and the labouring folk, the trades-people
of As