Page:The Viaduct Murder (1926).pdf/15

 CHAPTER I

THE PASTON OATVILE DORMY-HOUSE

NOTHING is ever wasted. The death of the animal fertilizes the vegetable world: bees swarm in the disused pillar-box; sooner or later, somebody will find a use for the munition factories. And the old country-seats of feudal England, that bask among their figured terraces, frowning at the ignoble tourist down secular avenues and thrusting back the high-road he travels by into respectful detours-these too, although the family have long since decided that it is too expensive to live there, and the agents smile at the idea of letting them like one humouring a child, have their place in the hero-tenanted England of to-day. The house itself may be condemned to the scrap-heap, but you can always make a golf-course out of the Park. Acres, that for centuries have scorned the weight of the plough, have their stubborn glebe broken with the niblick, and over-populated greens recall the softness and the trimness of earlier lawns. Ghosts of an earlier day will walk there, perhaps, but you can always play through them.

Paston Oatvile (distrust the author whose second paragraph does not come to ground in the particular) Rh