..]
[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) 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.
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