And Old Mole returned to the strain of his existence. Impossible, he thought, to stay in London. Equally impossible to retain so huge a sum of money. It would go on swelling like a tumor, and, like a tumor, it would create a stoppage either in his own life or in someone's else. Had it not already done so? Had it not played its part in the tragi-comedy that was not yet come to its climax? Had it not raised him to an absurd height, blown him out into a caricature of himself, pulled out his nose, goggled his eyes, given him a hunch back and a pot belly, forced him into overfeeding, overdrinking, over-talking, into writing a ridiculous, pontifical, instructive book, choked his humor and played the very devil with his imagination? He pondered this question of the money and at last he had an inspiration. He went down over Blackfriars Bridge and into the slums of Southwark. In a foul street he called at a house and asked how many people there might be living in it. He was told twenty-three: four families. In another there were thirty-one. In another he was asked in by the woman, and there was a corpse on the bed, and there were three children eating bread and jam for their dinner on the table only a yard from it, and the woman was clearly going to have another child. He asked the name of the landlord of that house, and next day sought him out. He bought the house: he went on buying until he had the whole row, then the whole street, then the next street and the next, and the next, until his money was all gone but ten thousand pounds. Then he gave orders for all the foul houses to be pulled down and a garden to be made. . . . He was told that it would be impossible--that he would have to get permission from the Borough Council, and the County Council, and Parliament. "Can't I do what I like with my own?" he said. "It's a question," said the rent collector who had taken him under his wing, "whether the Council can afford to do without the rates. If you pull the houses down, sir, you'll only make the overcrowding worse, because they must live somewhere, sir, and, bless you, they don't mind it. They're born in it and they die in it. You and I, sir, don't like the smell, but they don't never notice it." But Old Mole stuck to it and the houses were pulled down and a garden was made, and he said not a word about it to a soul. It was only a very little garden because, though he had bought many houses, he could not buy the land on which all of them were built because it was very dear. Almost best of all he liked the destructive part of the undertaking. Pulling down houses was in his mood and sorted with his circumstances. From his own house he had set his face. He had received a letter from Panoukian: