tiles;
for one's chief duties were making out orders to view the still empty
houses, hearing the complaints of established tenants, and keeping such
an eye on painters and paperhangers as was compatible with "being on the
spot if anybody called." An elderly or a delicate man would have found
it nice light work; but for a hulking youth fresh from the breeziest
school in Great Britain, where they live in flannels and only work when
it is wet or dark, the post seemed death in life. My one consolation was
to watch the tenants hurrying to the same train every morning, in the
same silk hat and blacks, and crawling home with the same evening paper
every night. I at any rate enjoyed comparatively pure air all day. I had
not married and settled down in a pretentious jerry-building where
nothing interesting could possibly happen, and nothing worth doing be
ever done. For that was one's first feeling about the Witching Hill
Estate; it was a place for crabbed age and drab respectability, and a
black coat every day of the week. Then young Uvo Delavoye dropped into
the office from another hemisphere, in the white ducks and helmet of
the tropics. And life began again.

"Are you the new clerk to the Estate?" he asked if he might ask, and I
prepared myself for the usual grievance. I said I was, and he gave me
his name in exchange for mine, with his number in Mulcaster Park, which
was all but a continuation of Witching Hill Road. "There's an absolute
hole in our lawn," he complained--"and I'd just marked out a court. I do
wish you could come and have a look at it."

There was room for a full-size lawn-tennis court behind every house on
the Estate. That was one of our advertised attractions. But it was not
our business to keep the courts in order, and I rather itched to say so.

"It's early days," I ventured to suggest; "there's sure to be holes at
first, and I'm afraid there'll be nothing for it but just to fill them
in."

"Fill them in!" cried the other young man, getting quite excited. "You
don't know what a hole this is; it would take a ton of earth to fill it
in."

"You're not serious, Mr. Delavoye."

"Well, it would take a couple of barrow-loads. It's a regular depression
in the ground, and the funny thing is that it's come almost while my
back was turned. I finished marking out the court last night, and this
morning there's this huge hole bang in the middle of one of my
side-lines! If you filled it full of water it would tak