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