To take another case. Four years ago the District Council laid a water-main across some private property without complying with the forms prescribed by law; and as soon as it was laid, the owner told the Council to take it up, though it had cost about £240 to lay. He was within his rights; and he frightened the Council into an agreement to pay him a way-leave if he would allow it to remain, and to take it up if he gave six months’ notice. He has given notice and then withdrawn it on condition of the Council’s doing something for him which the Council was not really bound to do; and, so far as I can see, he may repeat the process as often as he likes. The ratepayers find the money for it all. If a District Council needs a loan for carrying out large works, the plans and specifications and estimates have to be submitted to the Ministry of Health before the loan is sanctioned. In these matters the Ministry follows the practice of the old Local Government Board; and when a loan was needed for the Moreton sewage scheme, the Board sent down one of its inspectors. He held an inquiry at Moreton, and went over the ground; and he passed the plans and specifications containing the outrageous blunder I have mentioned. Hence the sewage fountain on the road. In spite of all formalities, works are not always carried out according to the plans passed by the Ministry or Board. On the plans of the joint sewer here (Lustleigh and part of Bovey) there is a settling-tank for the sewage and an effluent to irrigate the fields below; but the tank has never been built, and raw sewage is run out upon the land. The tank appears upon the plans that were endorsed on the agreements with the landowners; and they can compel the Council to build it--at the ratepayers’ expense. The ratepayers imagined that the tank was there, and had been paid for from the loan the Board had sanctioned for carrying out the plans. Amongst the works for giving Bovey more water (at a cost of upwards of £11,000) there are three horizontal shafts, or ‘adits,’ driven into Haytor down; and one of them is more than a quarter of a mile in length. The work was carried out in lavish style--these shafts remind me of the entrances to royal tombs that I have seen in Egypt. The water from the shafts must be quite pure; but water was also taken from an open stream that runs through Yarner wood, and may have dead rabbits and other unpleasant things in it; and this water goes into the same main without filtration. That being so, the shafts were hardly worth their cost. And although the water from them is so very pure, it is a little ‘sour’ (as moorland water often is) and therefore picks up lead in passing through lead pipes. As lead pipes have been laid, there is now a danger of lead-poisoning in Bovey, and so also in Lustleigh with its moorland water and lead pipes. And in both these places the lead pipes are in accordance with the plans and specifications passed by the Ministry of Health.