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would lob dry conversation-starters in Daniel’s direction. Just to be a good sport, Daniel would do the same. But neither man could accept the loss of face that attended curiosity. Daniel could not bring himself to come out and ask what Mr. Threader did for a living, as he could see that among the set who kept big houses in the country, it was perfectly obvious, and that only an idiot, or a grubby Whig, would not know. Mr. Threader, for his part, wanted to know how Daniel was connected to the Earl of Lostwithiel. To him, it was monstrously strange that an aged Natural Philosopher should materialize all of a sudden in the middle of Dartmoor, in a coonskin wrapper, and croak out a few words that would cause every gentleman in a twenty-mile radius to liquidate other holdings, and buy stock in that commercial Lunatick Asylum, the Proprietors of the Engine for Raising Water by Fire.
    Daniel had developed two alternative hypotheses: Mr. Threader was a betting agent who roamed about taking and settling wagers. Or, Mr. Threader was a Jesuit in disguise, visiting the homes of crypto-CatholicJacobite Tories to hear confessions and to collect tithes. The polished wooden chests, according to this hypothesis, contained communion wafers, chalices, and other Popish gear.
    All of these speculations collapsed in a few minutes when Daniel saw Blenheim Palace a-building; realized whose estate they were on; and, in his astonishment, forgot himself, and blurted, “Is he here?”
    “Is who here, precisely? Dr. Waterhouse?” Mr. Threader asked delicately.
    “Churchill.”
    “ Which Churchill?” Mr. Threader asked shrewdly. For new ones were being produced all the time.
    “The Duke of Marlborough.” Then Daniel came to his senses. “No. I’m sorry. Stupid question. He’s in Antwerp.”
    “Frankfort.”
    “He has just moved to Antwerp,” Daniel insisted.
    This occurred moments before Mr. Threader went into one of Marlborough’s out-houses to do whatever it was that he did. Meanwhile Daniel meditated on the foolishness of his little outburst. Obviously the Lord of the Manor was not in residence now. Men who owned such estates did not live upon them, at least, not in January. At this time of the year they were all in London. The most important occupants of the country estates were not men, but sheep, and the most important activity was conversion of grass into wool; for wool, exported, brought revenue, and revenue, farmed, enabled gentlefolk to pay rent, buy wine, and gamble in London, all winter long.
    All clear enough in its general outlines. But as Daniel had got older he had developed a greater respect for details. Mr. Threader, he suspected, was a detail.
    To a merchant, England was a necklace of sea-ports surrounding a howling impoverished waste. As with a burning log on a hearth, all the warmth, color and heat lay in the outer encrustation of ruby-red coals. The interior was cold, damp, dark, and dead. The sea served the same purpose for the commerce of England as the atmosphere did for combustion of a log. Any place that the sea could not reach was of no account, save in the vastly inferior sense that it sort of held everything together structurally.
    And yet England did have an interior. Daniel had quite forgotten this until he had been awakened by the sheep-teeth right in front of his face. Unlike, say, the interior of New Spain, which produced its wealth in a few highly concentrated mines, England’s countryside made its treasure in the most diffuse way imaginable. There were no wool-mines. A given swath of grass produced infinitesimal revenue. In order to arrange it so that a Lord could wager a hundred guineason a horse-race, some kind of frightfully tedious and complicated money-gathering process would have to take place, and it would have to take place all over England, all the time, without letup. Daniel’s eyes watered, to think of the number of separate transactions that must go on, all over a given