some empty skull from which the life has fled, and there at once are the
huge wrought-iron gates, and one peeps through them to see the facade of
this place, very white and large and fine, down a long avenue of yews.
Eastry was far greater than Bladesover and an altogether completer
example of the eighteenth century system. It ruled not two villages, but
a borough, that had sent its sons and cousins to parliament almost as a
matter of right so long as its franchise endured. Every one was in the
system, every one--except my uncle. He stood out and complained.

My uncle was the first real breach I found in the great front of
Bladesover the world had presented me, for Chatham was not so much a
breach as a confirmation. But my uncle had no respect for Bladesover and
Eastry--none whatever. He did not believe in them. He was blind even to
what they were. He propounded strange phrases about them, he exfoliated
and wagged about novel and incredible ideas.

"This place," said my uncle, surveying it from his open doorway in the
dignified stillness of a summer afternoon, "wants Waking Up!"

I was sorting up patent medicines in the corner.

"I'd like to let a dozen young Americans loose into it," said my uncle.
"Then we'd see."

I made a tick against Mother Shipton's Sleeping Syrup. We had cleared
our forward stock.

"Things must be happening SOMEWHERE, George," he broke out in a
querulously rising note as he came back into the little shop. He fiddled
with the piled dummy boxes of fancy soap and scent and so forth that