THE WAY OF DESTRUCTION.
Now for the individual houses. A. had great charm and a beautiful garden and park ; but the county family who lived there, perhaps for negative, perhaps for positive reasons, sold it for " development." It was at once' cut up into plots. The estate is now a sort of suburb of what was a charming county town, and you can scarcely tell where the old place was. Troja fait. Five miles away B.,' a newer and rather more pretentious house, with fine trees in front of it and delightful level meadows behind it (admirably fitted and once used for polo), proved unsaleable as a dwelling-house ; but fetched a certain amount of money for destruction. The trees were felled, the house, too, was felled, except the walls holding its water tank, which now form an isolated tower, looking queerly forlorn. Neighbours are making rock gardens of the balustrades and broken stone. C. is close by, another large house of very different pattern, with a singularly pleasing garden behind it. It has-been quite empty these two or three years. The once famous tennis lawns decay. One outside building has been converted into a cottage ; but no use for the big house itself has yet been found, though vain rumours of a school and a nunnery have been bruited.
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