Coiltiti* Li fe aria Sport KILLING '. THE WHITE ELEPII
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The end; the final. -dissolution, of a great country house is proclaimed.. for_a; date . in the. folloWing_week.; and some of us see in_the. event also the end, the -final dissolution, of a volume. in: English county. history: The house is solid and comfortable, and lacks. only one thing, a man or. family willing to live in it: But it is spacious,-made for older days when neighbours. had money and- leiSure enough to support polo matches on the jolly fields behind- the house, for older days when no one had. heard . of the. ideal of. " a little 'house and large car," for older. days when the home mattered supremely. There is 'something singularly :grim about the details of the. destruction_ for: those who take interest in that matrix of the higher civilization in Europe that all know a., the English Country -House. This one is to be scientifically disintegrated ; and sold for' what the bits—the disfecta mentbra—may fetch : so many hundred doors, so many feet of oak panelling, so many oak rails and an oak staircase, so many bricks and tiles. The bricks in question are themselves a symbol of a vanishing age. By a fad of the founder they were so carefully made and selected that they could be built together . without the adventitious assistance of mortar, except only at the corners. The work was carried out with such care and precision—in those more leisurely days-- that the walls are righter and tighter without mortar than arc other walls though daubed and splashed with buckets, though grOuted and mortared and buttressed. A Greek temple was not more affectionately finished. Yet the " house7 breakers "—that delightful technical term—will have an easy job and will very _soon get. the house down level with the ground ,and, have . so little rubbish that the place of will be no more seen. All that will.remain—and in that, too, you may find strange symbols-will be the deep and solid foundations. It would need too much labour, we may suppose, to eradicate these. •
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