ase had come, and for suchlike public
uses. We had done this not only with Lord Redcar's house, but also
with Checkshill House--where old Mrs. Verrall made a dignified
and capable hostess,--and indeed with most of the fine residences
in the beautiful wide country between the Four Towns district and
the Welsh mountains. About these great houses there had usually
been good outbuildings, laundries, married servants' quarters,
stabling, dairies, and the like, suitably masked by trees, we
turned these into homes, and to them we added first tents and wood
chalets and afterward quadrangular residential buildings. In order
to be near my mother I had two small rooms in the new collegiate
buildings which our commune was almost the first to possess, and they
were very convenient for the station of the high-speed electric
railway that took me down to our daily conferences and my secretarial
and statistical work in Clayton.

Ours had been one of the first modern communes to get in order; we
were greatly helped by the energy of Lord Redcar, who had a fine
feeling for the picturesque associations of his ancestral home--the
detour that took our line through the beeches and bracken and
bluebells of the West Wood and saved the pleasant open wildness
of the park was one of his suggestions; and we had many reasons to
be proud of our surroundings. Nearly all the other communes that
sprang up all over the pleasant parkland round the industrial
valley of the Four Towns, as the workers moved out, came to us to
study the architecture of the residential squares and quadrangles
with which we had replaced the back streets between the great
houses and the ecclesiastical residences about the cathedral, and
the way in which we had adapted all these buildings to our new
social needs. Some claimed to have improved on us. But they could
not emulate the rhododendron garden out beyond our shrubberies; that
was a thing altogether our own in our part of England, because of
its ripeness and of the rarity of good peat free from lime.

These gardens had been planned under the third Lord Redcar, fifty
years ago and more; they abounded in rhododendra and azaleas, and
were in places so well sheltered and sunny that great magnolias
flourished and flowered. There were tall trees smothered in crimson
and yellow climbing roses, and an endless variety of flowering
shrubs and fine conifers, and such pampas grass as no other garden
can show. And barred by the broad s