The Deserted House
The recent vicissitudes of the house are worth the notice of the social historian. For the usual reasons the ancestral owner felt that he must sell house and lands. They were purchased by a man who would have been welcomed by the whole neighbourhood and who would have been of much benefit to his neighbours, even if he had done no more than maintain the beauty of house, garden and park. He began to make improvements, which included (to my amusement) the uprooting of a monkey-puzzle tree. These tentative steps soon ceased, for he, too, was forced to sell, for the mason that a permit to repair the house was refused. The buyer had small personal use for the house—only for the land—and there is no sign that it will again be inhabited. Perhaps, like a near-by house which was pulled down, it will be reduced to the value of its materials. From such a collapse everyone thereabouts suffers. A village feels a real interest, even a sense of vicarious ownership, in a great house full of beautiful things, in a glorious garden, in a spacious park crossed by several rights-of-way, and fine groves and clumps of trees. Even in regard to sport, of which much political capital has been made, the shooting of game by a syndicate is no improvement on the private assembly of neighbouring sportsmen. It is not too much to say that such extinction of- the country house is all loss, socially and materially.
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