next door but one.”  Calling next door but one, you are joined after the lapse of a few minutes by a bald, stout gentleman, or a lady of immemorial years, who offers to go over “the property” with you.  Apparently the intervals between visits to view are spent in slumber, and these old people come out refreshed and keen to scrutinise their possible new neighbours.  They will tell you all about the last tenant, and about the present tenants on either side, and about themselves, and how all the other houses in the neighbourhood are damp, and how they remember when the site of the house was a cornfield, and what they do for their rheumatism.  As one hears them giving a most delightful vent to their loquacity, the artistic house-hunter feels all the righteous self-applause of a kindly deed.  Sometimes they get extremely friendly.  One old gentleman—­to whom anyone under forty must have seemed puerile—­presented the gentle writer with three fine large green apples as a kind of earnest of his treatment:  apples, no doubt, of some little value, since they excited the audible envy of several little boys before they were disposed of.

Sometimes the landlord has even superintended the building of the house himself, and then it often has peculiar distinctions—­no coal cellar, or a tower with turrets, or pillars of ornamental marble investing the portico with disproportionate dignity.  One old gentleman, young as old gentlemen go, short of stature, of an agreeable red colour, and with short iron-grey hair, had a niche over the front door containing a piece of statuary.  It gave one the impression of the Venus of Milo in chocolate pyjamas.  “It was nood at first,” said the landlord, “but the neighbourhood is hardly educated up to art, and objected.  So I gave it that brown paint.”

On one expedition the artistic house-hunter was accompanied by Euphemia.  Then it was he found Hill Crest, a vast edifice at the incredible rent of L40 a year, with which a Megatherial key was identified.  It took the two of them, not to mention an umbrella, to turn this key.  The rent was a mystery, and while they were in the house—­a thunderstorm kept them there some time—­they tried to imagine the murder.  From the top windows they could see the roofs of the opposite houses in plan.

“I wonder how long it would take to get to the top of the house from the bottom?” said Euphemia.

“Certainly longer than we could manage every day,” said the artistic house-hunter.  “Fancy looking for my pipe in all these rooms.  Starting from the top bedroom at the usual time, I suppose one would arrive downstairs to breakfast about eleven, and then we should have to be getting upstairs again by eight o’clock if we wanted any night’s rest worth having.  Or we might double or treble existence, live a Gargantuan life to match the house, make our day of forty-eight hours instead of twenty-four.  By doubling everything we should not notice the hole it made in our time getting about the place.  Perhaps by making dinner last twice as long, eating twice as much, and doing everything on the scale of two to one, we might adapt ourselves to our environment in time, grow twice as big.”