tone. I found something very agreeable
and picturesque in its clean cobbled streets, its odd turnings and
abrupt corners; and in the pleasant park that crowds up one side of the
town. The whole place is under the Eastry dominion and it was the
Eastry influence and dignity that kept its railway station a mile and
three-quarters away. Eastry House is so close that it dominates the
whole; one goes across the marketplace (with its old lock-up and
stocks), past the great pre-reformation church, a fine grey shell, like
some empty skull from which the life has fled, and there at once are the
huge wrought-iron gates, and one peeps through them to see the facade of
this place, very white and large and fine, down a long avenue of yews.
Eastry was far greater than Bladesover and an altogether completer
example of the eighteenth century system. It ruled not two villages, but
a borough, that had sent its sons and cousins to parliament almost as a
matter of right so long as its franchise endured. Every one was in the
system, every one--except my uncle. He stood out and complained.

My uncle was the first real breach I found in the great front of
Bladesover the world had presented me, for Chatham was not so much a
breach as a confirmation. But my uncle had no respect for Bladesover and
Eastry--none whatever. He did not believe in them. He was blind even to
what they were. He propounded strange phrases about them, he exfoliated
and wagged about novel and incredible ideas.

"This place," said my uncle, surveying it from his open doorway in the
dignified stillness of a summer afternoon, "wants Waking Up!"

I was sorting up patent medicines in the corner.

"I'd like to let a dozen young Americans loose into it," said my uncle.
"Then we'd see."

I made a tick against Mother Shipton's Sleeping Syrup. We had cleared
our forward stock.

"Things must be happening SOMEWHERE, George," he broke out in a
querulously rising note as he came back into the little shop. He fiddled
with the piled dummy boxes of fancy soap and scent and so forth that
adorned the end of the counter, then turned about petulantly, stuck his
hands deeply into his pockets and withdrew one to scratch his head. "I
must do SOMETHING," he said. "I can't stand it.

"I must invent something. And shove it.... I could.

"Or a play. There's a deal of money in a play, George. What would you
think of me writing a play eh?... There's all sorts of things to be
done.

"Or the st