is the landowner who (if the talk of a railway being made over this bit of land doesn't come to anything, and the corporation cannot, after all, be induced to buy it as a recreation-ground, and no one makes a better offer) is willing to sell the ground to carry the house that Jack wants built.

This is the local authority who (if he can obtain details of the several requirements of the County Council, Parish Council, Central Housing Authority, Ministry Of Health, Board Of Agriculture, Ministry of Transport, Congested Districts Board, and any other departments interested, either now in existence or contemplated for the future) is going to inspect, revise, amend, and positively finally approve the designs of the architect and surveyor who ...

This is the building contractor who (provided that pressure of work allows him, and that he can get the materials, which is doubtful, and the men, which is hardly probable, and the price, which is practically out of the question) is going to carry out the designs, as finally approved by the local authority who ...

This is the railway official who (on the supposition that the congestion on the line will possibly be easier later, and that the supply of goods wagons is very considerably augmented, and that new loops and sidings not yet suggested will be constructed to relieve the pressure, and that a reorganisation of the railway staff does not move him elsewhere, as will almost certainly happen) has promised to do his best to expedite the transport of the necessary materials to the building contractor who ...

This is the merchant who (if prices are left entirely to his discretion and time is of no importance, and if he finds that, after all, it is to his advantage to sell in this country rather than to export, and if he doesn't retire in the meantime, as he is thinking of doing) has consented to try to send materials through the medium of the railway official who ...

These are the representatives of the building trades who (if all matters in dispute are satisfactorily settled by that time, and provided that they can all get their own houses sited, designed, passed, contracted for, supplied and built first) are going to erect the materials provided by the merchant who ...

And this? This, incidentally, is Jack.

CONVERTED CASTLES.

Rural England, I learn, is rapidly changing hands—not for the first time, by the way, but we cannot go into that just now. Excellent treatises on feudal tenure, wapentake, the dissolution of the monasteries and the enclosure of common lands may be picked up dirt cheap at any second-hand bookshop in the Charing Cross Road with the words "Presentation Copy" erased from the flyleaf by a special and ingenious process. What is happening now is that farmers are buying up the big estates in pieces, and Norman piles or Elizabethan manors are beginning to be too expensive to maintain, what with coal and the rise in the minimum wage of vassals and one thing and another.

as the poet justly observes. And even if there is enough money to keep up the castle without the broad acres (though as a matter of fact an acre is not any broader than it is long) there is no fun in having a castle at all when the deer park has been divided into allotments and the Dutch garden is under swedes.

The question is then what is going to happen to Montmorency (pronounced "Mumsie") Castle, and The Towers at Barley Melling?

In London the difficulty of dealing with huge houses has been solved in a very subtle manner by turning them into a couple of maisonettes apiece, so that under the portico of what used to be 105 Myrtle Crescent you discover two perfectly good doors, marked 105a and 105b. Into the letter-box of the door marked 105a the postman invariably puts the letters intended for 105b, and vice versá, but, as these are always letters addressed to the last tenant but two, it does not really very much matter. Both are desirable maisonettes, though the tenants of 105a have the sole enjoyment of the lincrusta dadoes in the original dining-room. In some cases there are as many as three maisonettes, and the notice on the area gate says, "105c. Mrs. Orlando Smith," where it used to say simply "No bottles." I never really understood that notice myself, for whenever I am walking along with an empty bottle that I want to get rid of I do not throw it down into an area, where it would make a most horrible crash, but softly into the thick shrubs of the Crescent Gardens.

This brings me back to the country again.

There will not be enough of the new rich to purchase a castellated mansion apiece, partly because of the Excess Profits Duty, which is crippling this kind of enterprise, and partly because so many baronial seats, romantic and picturesque in their way, are terribly under-garaged. On the other hand you cannot expect a farmer who happens to be buying the fields round Badgery Mortimer to have any use for a dungeon keep or the haunted picture-gallery in the west wing. No, there is only one thing to do and that is to break these places up into a number of self-contained homes.