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 versa_, 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.

* * * * *

[Illustration: MODERN AND ANCIENT.

_Young Cricketer_. "Yes, I cocked one off the splice in the gully
and the blighter gathered it."

_Father_. "Yes, but how did you get out? Were you caught, stumped or
bowled, or what?"]

* * * * *

HISTORIC FLATS TO LET

is the house-agents' advertisement which I seem to see, and what you
will actually find will be a sort of concentrated hamlet where modern
improvements are mixed with ancie