ussed the sun
upon just that point of the earth on which it chanced to be shining
vertically. There he stands, Napoleonically grouped with his retinue men
in tweeds and golfing-suits, a little solicitor, whose name I forget,
in grey trousers and a black jacket, and Westminster in Jaeger
underclothing, a floriferous tie, and peculiar brown cloth of his own.

The downland breeze flutters my uncle's coat-tails, disarranges his
stiff hair, and insists on the evidence of undisciplined appetites in
face and form, as he points out this or that feature in the prospect to
his attentive collaborator.

Below are hundreds of feet of wheeling-planks, ditches, excavations,
heaps of earth, piles of garden stone from the Wealden ridges. On either
hand the walls of his irrelevant unmeaning palace rise at one time he
had working in that place--disturbing the economic balance of the whole
countryside by their presence--upwards of three thousand men....

So he poses for my picture amidst the raw beginnings that were never to
be completed. He did the strangest things about that place, things more
and more detached from any conception of financial scale, things more
and more apart from sober humanity. He seemed to think himself, at last,
released from any such limitations. He moved a quite considerable hill,
and nearly sixty mature trees were moved with it to open his prospect
eastward, moved it about two hundred feet to the south. At another
time he caught a suggestion from some city restaurant and made a
billiard-room roofed with plate glass beneath the waters of his
ornamental lake. He furnished one wing while its roof still awaited
completion. He had a swimming bath thirty feet square next to his
bedroom upstairs, and to crown it all he commenced a great wall to hold
all his dominions together, free from the invasion of common men. It
was a ten-foot wall, glass surmounted, and had it been completed as he
intended it, it would have had a total length of nearly eleven miles.
Some of it towards the last was so dishonestly built that it collapsed
within a year upon its foundations, but some miles of it still stand. I
never think of it now but what I think of the hundreds of eager little
investors who followed his "star," whose hopes and lives, whose wives'
security and children's prospects are all mixed up beyond redemption
with that flaking mortar....

It is curious how many of these modern financiers of chance and bluff
have ended thei