a rumour of ghosts is safe. The water-scare upsets the
mistress, the ghost-scare upsets the maids; and when one can't get
maids, the country becomes a bore. As it is, she had the greatest
difficulty in keeping them, because there's no cinema near.

"Very well, then. Having decided on my line of action, I begin to spread
reports--very cautiously, of course, but with careful calculation, and
naturally never appearing myself; and gradually, bit by bit, Miss
Burgess takes a dislike to the place. Not always, of course. Some
tenants are most unreasonable. But sooner or later most of them fall to
the bait, and you get the house. That's my profession."

"Well," I said, "I think it's a blackguard one."

"Oh, sir!" he replied. "Live and let live."

"It's funny, all the same," I added, "that I should have run across you,
because I've been looking for a house for some time, and the only one I
liked was occupied."

He pulled out a pocket-book. "Yes?" he said, moistening his pencil.

But that is enough of him.

So much for my first way, which, as I happen to know, has succeeded, at
any rate once. Now for the other, which is less material. In fact, some
people might call it supernatural.

I was telling a lady about my friend the unsettler and his methods; but
she did not seem to be in the least impressed.

"All very well," she said; "but there's a more efficient and more
respectable way than that. And," she added, with a significant glance at
her husband and not without triumph, "I happen to know."

She sat at the dinner-table in the old farm-house--"modernized," as the
agents have it, "yet redolent of old-world charm." By modernized they
mean that the rightful occupiers--the simple agriculturists--had gone
for ever, and well-to-do artistic Londoners had made certain changes to
fit it for a week-end retreat. In other words, it had become a
_pied-a-terre_. Where the country folk for whom all these and smaller
cottages were built now live, who shall say? Probably in mean streets;
anyway, not here. The exterior remains often the same, but inside,
instead of the plain furniture of the peasantry, one finds wicker
arm-chairs and sofa-chairs, all the right books and weekly papers, and
cigarettes.

This particular farm-house was charming. An ingle-nook, Heal furniture,
old-pattern cretonnes and chintzes, an etching or two, a Japanese print
or two, a reproduction of a John, the poems of Mr. Masefield and Rupert
Brooke, a French no