ich is
practically out of the question) is going to carry out the designs, as
finally approved by the local authority who ...]

[Illustration: 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 ...]

[Illustration: 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 ...]

[Illustration: 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 ...]

[Illustration: 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.

"The stately homes of England
How beautiful they stood
Before their recent owners
Relinquished them for good,"

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)