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, 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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