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) 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 versá, 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.
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?"