who will sniff a little at the Jeffries in their attic suite and the Mutts who live in the moat.  But Mrs. Jeffries will have compensations, because the air is really so much more bracing, my dear, on the higher ground, and on fine days one can walk about the roof and peep through the boiling-oil holes, while as for the Mutts they are protected, at any rate, from those bitterly piercing east winds and have an excellent view of the draw-bridge.

A further advantage of residing at Soping Hall will be that you can do all your shopping and pay your calls without going out-of-doors on a wet day, and, if you like, have a communal dining-room or restaurant, where only those who have been recognised by the county should sit above the salt.  And if your friends come to visit you in expensive motor-cars they will have the privilege of passing through the great iron gates on the main road and up the large gravel drive planted on each side with the cedars of Lebanon which Roger de Soping brought back in his haversack from the Second Crusade.

I am quite aware that when federal devolution becomes really infectious and every county insists on a legislative assembly of its own it may be necessary to turn some of these great houses into Parliament chambers, and the rural civil service will also no doubt insist on having offices comparable with the vast hotels which their parent bodies occupy in London.  But this will not account for nearly all the ancestral seats, and, in calling the attention of the Minister of Health and Housing to this little memorandum of mine, I would specially urge him to note how it will solve some of the most difficult problems which confront him to-day.

There will be a rush upon these potted villages, and that will ease the situation in towns and free a number of cottages for agricultural labourers too.  There will be a rush, not only because of the advantages which I have already enumerated, but because all the people who live in Soping Hall will be able to put “Soping Hall” on their notepaper, and, if they like to pay for it, two wyverns rampant as well, and everyone outside the circle of their immediate friends will imagine that they have not only bought the whole place but even become the possessors of the flock of wyverns that used to be pastured on the Home Farm.

Three acres and a cow was all very well in its way, but what about two wyverns and a flat?  Evoe.

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[Illustration:  Dame (seeing the signpost).  “Stop, Jenkins—­stop!  I think it would be safer to turn back.  They may have catapults or something dangerous.”]

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TIPS FOR UNCLES.