The villages hummed with the exotic industries he had brought into being. The estate produced most of its raw material--food, wool, hides, peat for domestic fuel, stone in several varieties for building, and numerous products of the sea. It drew coal, wood and iron across the channel from the Caermere properties. The effort of the System had been from the outset to expand its self-sufficiency. Christian saw now the remarkable results of this effort on both sides. One village had its leather workers, beginning with the tanners at one end and finishing with the most skillful artificers--glovers, saddlers and shoemakers--at the other. A second village possessed its colony of builders--masons and carpenters alike--and with them guiding architects and designers of furniture and carving. Here also were the coopers, who served not only the brewery, but the butter-makers. These latter formed in turn a link with the great dairy establishment, which had for its flank the farming lands. The gardens, nurseries, orchards and long glasshouses were nearest to Emanuel’s residence, and their workers made up the largest of the hamlets. This was in other senses the metropolis of the state, for here were the printing-press, the bindery, the chemical laboratory, the electric-light plant, the photographic and drawing departments, the clergy house and the estate office. The smallest of the villages was in the center of the stock farm, where scientific breeding and experimental acclimatization had attained results of which the staid “Field” spoke in almost excited terms.
But to Christian’s mind by far the most interesting village was that nestled on the sea-shore, under the protection of the cliffs. When he had once seen this place, his cousin found if difficult to get him away from it, or to enlist his attention for other branches of the System. There was a small but sufficient wharf here, to which colliers of a fair burden could have access; shelter was secured for the home-built fishing craft in the little harbor by means of a breakwater. The red-roofed, gray-stone cottages clustered along the winding roadway which climbed the cliff made a picture fascinating to the young man’s eye, but his greater delight was in something not at first visible. Around a bend in the cove, out of sight of the village, was a factory for the manufacture of glass, and beyond this were pointed out to him other buildings, near the water’s edge, which he was told were used for curing, pickling and otherwise preserving fish. “We make our own glass for the gardens and forcing houses, ‘and for all the dwellings on the estate,” Emanuel had told him, “and for another use as well.”