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.

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[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?”]

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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 ancient grandeur and the white-haired seneschal is kept on to operate the electric lift.

Let us take, for instance, the case of Soping Hall.  There will be none of that untidy straggling arrangement about it which detracts so largely from the beauty of Soping Barnet, Little Soping and Soping Monachorum.  In Soping Hall the billiard-room will be the village club, the armoury the blacksmith’s shop, the housekeeper’s room the place where you buy buttons and balls of string and barley-sugar, the cellars the village tavern, and very nice too.  In the state-saloon, with a few trifling alterations, such as the introduction of a geyser and a sink, will live Mrs. Ponsonby-Smith,