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"Since then I have seen no other such sight, nor do I wish to see one. And ever since then I have made it my business, when I had need to build castles in Spain (the appetite for which comes upon me at least twice a week), to come up here on to this roof and survey the Roussillon, the Canigou and the Mediterranean Sea, and build castles in my head, for I have discovered realities to be appalling."

With these words he begged me to leave him.

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Let us be Antean: let us touch earth. Let us look at the pit out of which we were digged: let there be no false shame; let us talk of clay: of all the things in which the modern world has gone wrong there is nothing in which it has gone wrong more than in the point of clay. Our fathers before us, who were great men and wise—they knew what the thing was. When they had robbed a monastery or killed a king, or in some other way acquired an estate in land, what did they? They said to the steward or to the fathers of the village: "Is there no clay about?" And when they heard there was, there did they found their house. And in this way it has come about that all great Englishmen, or very nearly all great Englishmen have been born and brought up on clay.