in the broad expanse of Nature, free to roam, using their limbs, not shutting themselves up in railway carriages and cars, but using the best and most healthy means of locomotion-walking.

Sir James Paget says that "good food, clothing and fresh air and exercise are necessary to the healthy development of the human frame." Mens sana in corpore sano is a motto all must observe.

How important, also, that we should be jealous of the encroachments of desire to draw upon our stock of reserve energy! The latter is better kept up by breathing "ozonated" air than by resorting to the artificial recuperations of alcohol or chloral, which excite for a time and then in the reaction leave the subject in a worse state than before.

We can get this stock of reserve energy preserved or added to fully, only by opening our country casements in the early morning after a good night's repose

"Sweet is the breath of morn, her rising sweet

With charms of earliest birds."

On the score of recreations also, the same author, when referring to the fundamental factor in the economy of health "recreation" says that it includes one or more of these "three things, namely, uncertainties, wonders, and opportunities for the exercise of skill in something different from the regular work," and though they usually take the form of pleasure, and we have our food prepared for us and brought ready to our tables to be taken into our bodies, there to be used to repair our wasted tissues, yet we have other work to do, and Nature is constantly reminding us, perhaps sternly, but with evenhanded justice, Ye shall obey my laws, or ye shall not live.

T. L. ALGER.

CHAPTER XVII.

LAND AS A LUXURY.

BY C. F. DOWSETT, F.S.I.

Author of various Articles on Land and House Properties; "Striking Events in Irish History"; &c.

ONE of the definitions of Luxury given by Webster, is "anything delightful to the senses"-and whether it be a delight in tasting, touching, smelling, hearing or seeing, it is a luxury.

A purchaser of land has an object in his purchaseit may be income, or occupation, or speculation, or luxury.

If he buys for income, he must not be too particular to insist on beauty; if he buys for occupation he must make the basis of value a correspondence between the advantages the property possesses, and his requirements. If he buys for speculation he must consider the prospective results by development whether it be in minerals, or ground rents, or anything else; but if he buys for luxury he must regard it then from an æsthetic standpoint-and by æsthetic, I mean "The theory or philosophy of taste; the science of the beautiful in nature and art."

In a small country especially like the British Islands, the principle of æsthetics should obtain as much in nature as in art. If an owner of a beautiful art landscape is content to pay hundreds of pounds sterling per foot of canvas, why should he object to pay tens of pounds

sterling per acre for the more magnificent (because real) landscape in Nature which lies before him? He sits in his chair, and on one side he sees the beautiful painted landscape hanging on his wall, and on the other side he sees through his window the beautiful natural landscape of his broad acres. Some may say that the picture requires no "keeping up," but I reply that even if the land is not profitable, the "keeping up" of the worst has some compensation of value, equivalent at least to the "keeping up."

Is there any comparison from an aesthetic point of view between a low lying, heavy clay flat in Essex and a high lying, light soil, well timbered undulation of the Surrey Hills? The first may yield more gold, but the second will yield more beauty, and a purchaser must determine in choosing land what his object is in its possession.

When at the Syston Library sale (in December, 1884,) £3000 was paid for a Mazarin Bible, not so useful as one which could have been bought for three shillings, and enormous prices were paid for other books, the purchasers gratified their desire for luxury.

When Meissonier's picture (twelve inches by nine) of Napoleon the First in the Campaign of Paris," was sold (in June, 1882,) at Christie's rooms for 5800 guineas (£6080), i. e. £56 per square inch, the purchaser gratified his desire for luxury.

When in 1890 Meissonier's picture "1814," sold for £34,000 sterling, the purchaser gratified his desire for luxury.

When a purchaser paid £22, 120 for the picture Millett's Angelus"; when £23,440 was paid for Murillo's Conception of the Virgin"; when £7350 was paid for Turner's "Grand Canal"; when £10,605

was paid for Gainsborough's "Duchess of Devonshire"; when £7200 was paid for Ruben's "Venus and Adonis "; when £9975 was paid for Gainsborough's "The Sisters"; when 10,395 was paid for Boucher's "Madame de Pompadour" (and such instances could be extended indefinitely), these purchasers all gratified their desire for luxury.

When in 1890 one of the Rothschilds purchased an historic clock in Paris for 840,000 francs (about £33,600 sterling), he gratified his desire for luxury.

When some time ago a client of mine sold a park hack for 1100 guineas because of its perfect symmetry, the price was paid to gratify a desire for luxury.

When in December, 1891, at the sale of Admiral Spratt's old coins by Messrs. Sotheby and Co., a Richard II. farthing was sold for 4 guineas; an Edward V. groat sold for £5 7s. 6d.; a Richard III. half-groat sold for £7 17s. 6d., etc.; the purchasers all gratified their desire for luxuries.

So we might extend the list in examples of old china, and various articles of vertu; but the facts mentioned will suffice to enable me to enforce my point that articles of luxury must be paid for at their proper value; whether it be choice food, or choice drink, or choice pictures, or choice land, the value of luxury must be considered, and assessed, and paid for.

The broad acres of the British Islands are not so broad as to be indefinite; the limit to them is very reala few hundred miles in any direction determines their boundary; and when we consider that the richest people of the earth are located upon them, and the richest metropolis the world has ever seen is its centre of life, we recognise at once the reason why in the past such high prices have been paid for its choicest parts, and

regarding the last ten years of depressed values as a parenthesis of exception which only the more fully proves the rule of permanent value, I submit that as regards the future in proportion to the commercial prosperity of our country, and in proportion to the rich colonial, continental, and other persons who come to it to settle, so will æsthetic acres be valued at æsthetic prices.

To give an illustration of æsthetic acres from my personal experience I will refer to an estate in "Wild Wales," which I now have for sale, and ask who, with any taste for the majestically picturesque, would not in estimating its value take into account its beauty as well as its usefulness?

The estate comprises the magnificent Moel (mountain) Hebog, a portion of the very summit of which forms a part of it. This majestic mass of country rises up by the side of Beddgelert. Near by is the celebrated Pass of Aberglaslyn, one of the most romantic bits of scenery in the British Islands. At one part the stream runs through two precipices which rise to some 700 feet. The entire district is an unbroken succession of mountains and valleys, of magnificent contour and dependencies. I regret my inability to give that graphic touch of representation which would make a reflective mind picture faithfully its claims to that profound admiration which none who can really value natural beauty and who visited the original, could fail to yield. Lakes, tarns, pools, rivers, rivulets, streams, rills, cataracts, waterfalls, cascades, mountains, hills, peaks, passes, plains, precipices, tors, slopes, declivities, crests, coombes, dingles, exposed bluffs, secluded dells, ridges, knolls, gullets, islets, nooks, caves, craggy pastures, plantations, wild tracts, cultivated enclosures, fertile valleys, and almost every form of change into which the earth's surface is phenomenally or