_To the Editor of "The Inshot Times, Great and Little
Budford Chronicle and Home Counties Advertiser_."
SIR,--Even in _war-time_, when one cannot call our souls our own,
we may surely expect the privacy of individuals and the rights of
property to receive _some_ respect. An Englishman's home is still
his castle, though the debased morals and decayed manners of modern
_Society_ (?) seem to blind its members to the fact.
I wish to give publicity in your pages to a disgraceful _outrage_
of which I have been made the victim. On Tuesday last I was rudely
awakened from my afternoon rest by the sound of a large motor-car.
As I did not expect visitors I proceeded to the window in order
to discover to what the _intrusion_ might be due. What was my
_astonishment_ to discover that the vehicle contained a party of four
_perfect strangers_. Three of them, I regret to state, were wounded
officers; they were being driven by one of the modern games-playing
cigarette-smoking young women to whom the old-fashioned word "_lady_"
seems so _singularly_ inapplicable. Their sole object in entering
appeared to be the perpetration of a senseless practical _joke_, for
after _careering_ round my garden at a pace which I can only describe
as _unwomanly_, they went off by the way they had come.
My gardener, who witnessed the incident, tells me that on reaching
the road they stopped the vehicle and celebrated the success of their
inane efforts by _shrieking_ with that unrestrained mirth which jars
so painfully on refined ears.
Can _nothing_ be done?