what
was the man's name that built it, and whether he got much money for his
job?

These last were very difficult questions to answer. For Harthover had
been built at ninety different times, and in nineteen different styles,
and looked as if somebody had built a whole street of houses of every
imaginable shape, and then stirred them together with a spoon.

_For the attics were Anglo-Saxon._

_The third floor Norman._

_The second Cinque-cento._

_The first-floor Elizabethan._

_The right wing Pure Doric._

_The centre Early English, with a huge portico
copied from the Parthenon._

_The left wing pure B[oe]otian, which the country
folk admired most of all, because it was just like
the new barracks in the town, only three times as
big._

_The grand staircase was copied from the Catacombs
at Rome._

_The back staircase from the Tajmahal at Agra.
This was built by Sir John's
great-great-great-uncle, who won, in Lord Clive's
Indian Wars, plenty of money, plenty of wounds,
and no more taste than his betters._

_The cellars were copied from the caves of
Elephanta._

_The offices from the Pavilion at Brighton._

And the rest from nothing in heaven, or earth, or under the earth.

So that Harthover House was a great puzzle to antiquarians, and a
thorough Naboth's vineyard to critics, and architects, and all persons
who like meddling with other men's business, and spending other men's
money. So they were all setting upon poor Sir John, year after year, and
trying to talk him into spending a hundred thousand pounds or so, in
building, to please them and not himself. But he always put them off,
like a canny North-countryman as he was. One wanted him to build a
Gothic house, but he said he was no Goth; and another to build an
Elizabethan, but he said he lived under good Queen Victoria, and not
good Queen Bess; and another was bold enough to tell him that his house
was ugly, but he said he lived inside it, and not outside; and another,
that there was no unity in it, but he said that that was just why he
liked the old place. For he liked to see how each Sir John, and Sir
Hugh, and Sir Ralph, and Sir Randal, had left his mark upon the place,
each after his own taste; and he had no more notion of disturbing his