h
boxers. It's no good arguing with him. If you do, he simply quotes
figures to show the fortunes other people have made out of these things.
Besides, it's too late now, anyway. As far as I can make out, the fight
is going to take place in another week or two. All the same, it makes my
flesh creep.

Well, it's no use worrying, I suppose. Let's change the subject. Do you
know Monk's Crofton? Probably you don't, as I seem to remember hearing
something said about it being a recent purchase. Mr. Carmyle bought it
from some lord or other who had been losing money on the Stock Exchange.
I hope you haven't seen it, anyway, because I want to describe it at
great length. I want to pour out my soul about it. Ginger, what has
England ever done to deserve such paradises? I thought, in my ignorance,
that Mr. Faucitt's Cissister place was pretty good, but it doesn't even
begin. It can't compete. Of course, his is just an ordinary country
house, and this is a Seat. Monk's Crofton is the sort of place they used
to write about in the English novels. You know. "The sunset was falling
on the walls of G---- Castle, in B----shire, hard by the picturesque
village of H----, and not a stone's throw from the hamlet of J----." I
can imagine Tennyson's Maud living here. It is one of the stately homes
of England; how beautiful they stand, and I'm crazy about it.

You motor up from the station, and after you have gone about three
miles, you turn in at a big iron gate with stone posts on each side with
stone beasts on them. Close by the gate is the cutest little house with
an old man inside it who pops out and touches his hat. This is only the
lodge, really, but you think you have arrived; so you get all ready to
jump out, and then the car goes rolling on for another fifty miles or so
through beech woods full of rabbits and open meadows with deer in them.
Finally, just as you think you are going on for ever, you whizz round a
corner, and there's the house. You don't get a glimpse of it till then,
because the trees are too thick.

It's very large, and sort of low and square, with a kind of tower at
one side and the most fascinating upper porch sort of thing with
battlements. I suppose in the old days you used to stand on this and
drop molten lead on visitors' heads. Wonderful lawns all round, and
shrubberies and a lake that you can just see where the ground dips
beyond the fields. Of course it's too early yet for them to be out, but
to the left of