So he broached to me what speedily became the leading occupation of
his culminating years, Crest Hill. 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.
He would come down to Lady Grove on Friday night in a crowded motor-car
that almost dripped architects. He didn't, however, confine himself to
architects; every one was liable to an invitation to week-end and view
Crest Hill, and many an eager promoter, unaware of how Napoleonically
and completely my uncle had departmentalised his mind, tried to creep up
to him by way of tiles and ventilators and new electric fittings. Always
on Sunday mornings, unless the weather was vile, he would, so soon as
breakfast and his secretaries were disposed of, visit the site with a
considerable retinue, and alter and develop plans, making modifications,
Zzzz-ing, giving immense new orders verbally--an unsatisfactory way, as
Westminster and the contractors ultimately found.

There he stands in my memory, the symbol of this age for me, the man of
luck and advertisement, the current master of the world. There he
stands upon the great outward sweep of the terrace before the huge
main entrance, a little figure, ridiculously disproportionate to that
forty-foot arch, with the granite ball behind him--the astronomical
ball, brass coopered, that represented the world, with a little
adjustable tube of lenses on a gun-metal arm that foc