[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) 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?