Similarly I remember, on a morning in winter, standing on a wild country, road, gazing at another castle perched on a pre-feudal crag. But this castle was about fifteen times as big as the former one, and the crag had its earthy foot in a lake about a mile below. The scale of everything was terrifically larger. Still, the two castles, seen at proportionate distances, bore a strange, disconcerting, resemblance the one to the other. The architecture of the second, as of the first, would not compare with the Parthenon or New Scotland Yard. But it was not ugly. And assuredly it had an exquisite rightness in the landscape. I understood, far better than in the former instance, that it had been put precisely where it was, because no other spot would have been so suited to its purposes; its geographical relation to the sun and the lake and the mountains had been perfectly adjusted. I understood profoundly the meaning of all those rows of windows and all those balconies facing the south and southeast. I understood profoundly the intention of the great glazed box at the base of the castle. I could read the words that the wreath of smoke from behind the turreted roof was writing on the slate of the sky, and those words were “_Chauffage central_” From the façades I could construct the plan and arrangement of the interior of the castle. I could instantly decide which of its two hundred chambers were the costliest, and which would be the last to be occupied and the first to be left. I could feel the valves of its heart rising and falling. Here was the simple result of an unaffected human activity, which had endeavoured to achieve an honest utilitarian end, and, while succeeding, had succeeded also in giving pleasure to a mind representative of the twenty-third century. A grand hotel on a crag as impossible to climb as to descend is, and always will be, exotic, artificial, and against nature--like every effort of man! Why should a man want to leave that pancake, England, and reside for weeks at a time in dizzy altitudes in order to stare at mountains and propel himself over snow and ice by means of skis, skates, sledges, and other unnatural dodges? No one knows. But the ultimate sequel, gathered up and symbolised in the grand hotel, contributes to the happiness of peoples and gives joy to the eye that is not afflicted with moral cataract.