Perhaps the exquisite exasperation of the business for the man who hunts among empty houses for a home is, that it is so entirely a choice of second-hand, or at least ready-made goods.  To me, at least, there is a decided suggestion of the dead body in your empty house that has once been occupied.  Here, like pale ghosts upon the wall paper, are outlined the pictures of the departed tenant; here are the nails of the invisible curtains, this dent in the wall is all that is sensible of a vanished piano.  I could fancy all these things creeping back to visibility as the light grew dim.  Someone was irritable in the house, perhaps, and a haunting fragrance of departed quarrels is to be found in the loose door-handles, and the broken bell-pull.  Then the blind in the bedroom has a broken string.  He was a beer-drinker, for the drip of the tap has left its mark in the cellar; a careless man, for this wall is a record of burst water-pipes; and rough in his methods, as his emendation of the garden gate—­a remedy rather worse than the disease—­shows.  The mark of this prepotent previous man is left on the house from cellar to attic.  It is his house really, not mine.  And against these haunting individualities set the horrible wholesale flavour, the obvious dexterous builder’s economies of a new house.  Yet, whatever your repulsion may be, the end is always the same.  After you have asked for your ideal house a hundred times or so you begin to see you do not get it.  You go the way of your kind.  All houses are taken in despair.

But such disgusts as this are for the man who really aims at taking a house.  The artist house-hunter knows better than that.  He hunts for the hunt’s sake, and does not mar his work with a purpose.  Then house-hunting becomes a really delightful employment, and one strangely neglected in this country.  I have heard, indeed, of old ladies who enlivened the intervals of their devotions in this manner, but to the general run of people the thing is unknown.  Yet a more entertaining way of spending a half-holiday—­having regard to current taste—­it should be difficult to imagine.  An empty house is realistic literature in the concrete, full of hints and allusions if a little wanting in tangible humanity, and it outdoes the modern story in its own line, by beginning as well as ending in a note of interrogation.  That it is not more extensively followed I can only explain by supposing that its merits are generally unsuspected.  In which case this book should set a fashion.

One singular thing the house-hunter very speedily discovers is, that the greater portion of the houses in this country are owned by old gentlemen or old ladies who live next door.  After a certain age, and especially upon retired tradespeople, house property, either alone or in common with gardening, exercises an irresistible fascination.  You always know you are going to meet a landlord or landlady of this type when you read on your order to view, “Key