et with
plaster-of-Paris in holes drilled in the slabs. These clips are 1-1/2
in. by 3/17 in., and are 17 in. apart. The roofs are slightly pitched to
the front edges, where they drain into gold-plated copper-gutters on
plated wrought-iron brackets, with one side flashed up over the blocks,
which raise the slabs from the beam-tops, to clear the joint gutters....
But now I babble again of that base servitude, which I would forget, but
cannot: for every measurement, bolt, ring, is in my brain, like a
burden: but it is past, it is past--and it was vanity.

* * * * *

Six months ago to-day it was finished: six months more protracted,
desolate, burdened, than all those sixteen years in which I built.

I wonder what a man--another man--some Shah, or Tsar, of that far-off
past, would say now of me, if eye could rest upon me! With what awe
would he certainly shrink before the wild majesty of these eyes; and
though I am not lunatic--for I am not, I am not--how would he fly me
with the exclamation: 'There is the very lunacy of Pride!'

For there would seem to him--it must be so--in myself, in all about me,
something extravagantly royal, touched with terror. My body has
fattened, and my girth now fills out to a portly roundness its broad
Babylonish girdle of crimson cloth, minutely gold-embroidered, and hung
with silver, copper and gold coins of the Orient; my beard, still black,
sweeps in two divergent sheaves to my hips, flustered by every wind; as
I walk through this palace, the amber-and-silver floor reflects in its
depths my low-necked, short-armed robe of purple, blue, and scarlet,
a-glow with luminous stones. I am ten times crowned Lord and Emperor; I
sit a hundred times enthroned in confirmed, obese old Majesty. Challenge
me who will--challenge me who dare! Among those myriad worlds upon which
I nightly pore, I may have my Peers and Compeers and Fellow-denizens ...
but _here_ I am Sole; Earth acknowledges my ancient sway and hereditary
sceptre: for though she draws me, not yet, not yet, am I hers, but she
is mine. It seems to me not less than a million million aeons since
other beings, more or less resembling me, walked impudently in the open
sunlight on this planet, which is rightly mine--I can indeed no longer
picture to myself, nor even credit, that such a state of things--so
fantastic, so far-fetched, so infinitely droll--could have existed:
though, at bottom, I suppose, I know that it