I did it on the system adopted by the makers of the Basilica of St. Mark at Venice. Those economical people built their walls of brick and laid their marbles upon that. My collection of marbles was distinctly inferior to theirs, but I flatter myself that it was come by more honestly. The only piece of which I felt doubtful, not as regards beauty, but respecting the honourable nature of its original acquiring, was a fine slab, with many inlays. It was given to Augustus J. C. Hare by the Commander of one of the British transports that returned from the Black Sea and the Crimea in 1855, and it was originally in a church near Balaclava. In the catalogue of the sale of Mr. Hare's effects at Hurstmonceaux, the name of the British officer was given and the name of his ship and the name of the church, but the rest is silence. I cannot believe that that British officer would have been guilty of sacrilege; but I do not know how many hands a thing like this should pass through in order to lose the stain of sacrilege, so I don't worry over the question of the morality of the transaction, any more than the devout worshippers do beneath the mosaics of St. Mark--that greatest depository of stolen goods in the world. All the rest of my coloured marbles that I applied to the brickwork of my little structure came mostly from old mantelpieces and restaurant tables, but I was lucky enough to alight upon quite a large number of white Sicilian tiles, more than an inch thick, which were invaluable to me, and a friendly stonemason gave me several yards of statuary moulding: it must have cost originally about what I paid for my entire building. It was a great pleasure to me to watch the fabric arise, which it did like the towers of Ilium, to music--the music of the thrushes and blackbirds and robins of our English landscape in the early summer when I began my operations--they lasted just on a fortnight--and the splendid colour-chorus of the borders. But what is a Temple on a hill without steps? and what are steps without piers, and what are piers without vases? All came in due time. I found an excellent quarry not too far away, and from it I got several tons of stone that was easily shaped and squared, and there is very little art needed to deal efficiently with such monoliths as I had laid on the slope of the mound--the work occupied a man and his boy just three days. The source of the piers is my secret; but there they are with their stone vases to-day, and now from the marble seat of the temple, thickly overspread with cushions, one can overlook the parterres between the mound and the house, and feel no need for the sunk garden which is the ambition of such as must be on the crest of the latest wave of fashion. CHAPTER THE TWELFTH