THE WATER BABIES
it was built, and what was the man's name that built it, and whether he got much money for his job?
These last were very difficult questions to answer. For Harthover had been built at ninety different times, and in nineteen styles, and looked as if somebody had built a whole street of houses of every imaginable shape, and then stirred them together with a spoon.
For the attics were Anglo-Saxon.
The third floor Norman.
The second Cinque-cento.
The first floor Elizabethan.
The right wing pure Doric.
The centre Early English, with a huge portico copied from the Parthenon.
The left wing pure Bœotian, which the country folk admired most of all, because it was just like the new barracks in the town, only three times as big.
The grand staircase was copied from the Catacombs at Rome.
The back staircase from the Taj Mahal at Agra. This was built by Sir John's great-great-great uncle, who won, in Lord Clive's Indian Wars, plenty of money, plenty of wounds, and no more taste than his betters.
The cellars were copied from the caves of Elephanta.
The offices from the Pavilion at Brighton.
And the rest from nothing in heaven, or earth, or under the earth.
So that Harthover House was a great puzzle to antiquarians, and a thorough Naboth's vineyard to
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