It is curious how many of these modern financiers of chance and bluff have ended their careers by building. It was not merely my uncle. Sooner or later they all seem to bring their luck to the test of realisation, try to make their fluid opulence coagulate out as bricks and mortar, bring moonshine into relations with a weekly wages-sheet. Then the whole fabric of confidence and imagination totters—and down they come.... When I think of that despoiled hillside, that colossal litter of bricks and mortar, and crude roads and paths, the scaffolding and sheds, the general quality of unforeseeing outrage upon the peace of nature, I am reminded of a chat I had with the vicar one bleak day after he had witnessed a glide. He talked to me of aeronautics as I stood in jersey and shorts beside my machine, fresh from alighting, and his cadaverous face failed to conceal a peculiar desolation that possessed him. “Almost you convince me,” he said, coming up to me, “against my will.... A marvellous invention! But it will take you a long time, sir, before you can emulate that perfect mechanism—the wing of a bird.” He looked at my sheds. “You’ve changed the look of this valley, too,” he said. “Temporary defilements,” I remarked, guessing what was in his mind. “Of course. Things come and go. Things come and go. But—H’m. I’ve just been up over the hill to look at Mr. Edward Ponderevo’s new house. That—that is something more permanent. A magnificent place!—in many ways. Imposing. I’ve never somehow brought myself to go that way before. Things are greatly advanced.... We find—the great number of strangers introduced into the villages about here by these operations, working-men chiefly, a little embarrassing. It put us out. They bring a new spirit into the place; betting—ideas—all sorts of queer notions. Our publicans like it, of course. And they come and sleep in one’s outhouses—and make the place a little unsafe at nights. The other morning I couldn’t sleep—a slight dyspepsia—and I looked out of the window. I was amazed to see people going by on bicycles. A silent procession. I counted ninety-seven—in the dawn. All going up to the new road for Crest Hill. Remarkable I thought it. And so I’ve been up to see what they were doing.” “They would have been more than remarkable thirty years ago,” I said. “Yes, indeed. Things change. We think nothing of it now at all—comparatively. And that big house—” He raised his eyebrows. “Really stupendous! Stupendous. “All the hillside—the old turf—cut to ribbons!” His eye searched my face. “We’ve grown so accustomed to look up to Lady Grove,” he said, and smiled in search of sympathy. “It shifts our centre of gravity.” “Things will readjust themselves,” I lied. He snatched at the phrase. “Of course,” he said.