But all the world has heard of that
extravagant place which grew and changed its plans as it grew, and
bubbled like a salted snail, and burgeoned and bulged and evermore
grew. I know not what delirium of pinnacles and terraces and arcades and
corridors glittered at last upon the uplands of his mind; the place,
for all that its expansion was terminated abruptly by our collapse, is
wonderful enough as it stands,--that empty instinctive building of a
childless man. His chief architect was a young man named Westminster,
whose work he had picked out in the architecture room of the Royal
Academy on account of a certain grandiose courage in it, but with him
he associated from time to time a number of fellow professionals,
stonemasons, sanitary engineers, painters, sculptors, scribes, metal
workers, wood carvers, furniture designers, ceramic specialists,
landscape gardeners, and the man who designs the arrangement and
ventilation of the various new houses in the London Zoological Gardens.
In addition he had his own ideas. The thing occupied his mind at all
times, but it held it completely from Friday night to Monday morning.
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