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.
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