For four days I would do nothing, simply lying and watching, shirking a load so huge:  but on the fifth morning I languidly began something:  and I had not worked an hour, when a fever took me—­to finish it, to finish it—­and it lasted upon me, with only three brief intervals, nearly seven years; nor would the end have been so long in coming, but for the unexpected difficulty of getting the four flat roofs water-tight, for I had to take down half the east one.  Finally, I made them of gold slabs one-and-a-quarter inch thick, smooth on both sides, on each beam double gutters being fixed along each side of the top flange to catch any leakage at the joints, which are filled with slaters’-cement.  The slabs are clamped to the top flanges by steel clips, having bolts set with plaster-of-Paris in holes drilled in the slabs.  These clips are 1-1/2 in. by 3/17 in., and are 17 in. apart.  The roofs are slightly pitched to the front edges, where they drain into gold-plated copper-gutters on plated wrought-iron brackets, with one side flashed up over the blocks, which raise the slabs from the beam-tops, to clear the joint gutters....  But now I babble again of that base servitude, which I would forget, but cannot:  for every measurement, bolt, ring, is in my brain, like a burden:  but it is past, it is past—­and it was vanity.

* * * * *

Six months ago to-day it was finished:  six months more protracted, desolate, burdened, than all those sixteen years in which I built.

I wonder what a man—­another man—­some Shah, or Tsar, of that far-off past, would say now of me, if eye could rest upon me!  With what awe would he certainly shrink before the wild majesty of these eyes; and though I am not lunatic—­for I am not, I am not—­how would he fly me with the exclamation:  ‘There is the very lunacy of Pride!’

For there would seem to him—­it must be so—­in myself, in all about me, something extravagantly royal, touched with terror.  My body has fattened, and my girth now fills out to a portly roundness its broad Babylonish girdle of crimson cloth, minutely gold-embroidered, and hung with silver, copper and gold coins of the Orient; my beard, still black, sweeps in two divergent sheaves to my hips, flustered by every wind; as I walk through this palace, the amber-and-silver floor reflects in its depths my low-necked, short-armed robe of purple, blue, and scarlet, a-glow with luminous stones.  I am ten times crowned Lord and Emperor; I sit a hundred times enthroned in confirmed, obese old Majesty.  Challenge me who will—­challenge me who dare!  Among those myriad worlds upon which I nightly pore, I may have my Peers and Compeers and Fellow-denizens ... but here I am Sole; Earth acknowledges my ancient sway and hereditary sceptre:  for though she draws me, not yet, not yet, am I hers, but she is mine.  It seems to me not less than a million million aeons since other beings, more or less resembling me, walked impudently in the open