You see, for nearly five years Devonshire House was, in the name of charity, thrown open to the public, so that probably more people were acquainted with the geography of this mansion than with any other ducal house which has not become either an hotel or a museum. So: "Poor old Devonshire House!" "Yes, it looks just like a bombed château during the war!" * * * It did. Workmen swarmed over it, stood on walls picking at it, sending it earthwards in clouds of dry, white dust. Great gashes had been cut in the sides, windows had been knocked out, the daylight shone into the out-buildings, exposing the discreet wall-paper of the servantry, and that wide-walled courtyard through which swung the coaches of Fox, Burke, and the "New Whigs" in the days when men, and many a pretty woman, plotted against Pitt, was the loading spot for builders' carts and a place in which anyone could light a bon-fire to burn lath and plaster. There was great interest in this patch of changing London. Not one person passing on an omnibus but remarked about it; and no wonder, for this is Piccadilly's most dramatic assassination. In the sound of the picks you could hear the voice of the new age--or the Chancellor of the Exchequer, which ever you liked! These great houses round which centred the wit, the beauty, the scholarship, the politics, and the art of the eighteenth century have outlived their day. London has crept up from Ludgate Hill like a tidal wave and over-whelmed them. Devonshire House stood, strange and incongruous behind its feudal wall, like the Lord Mayor's coach in a traffic hold-up. Great hotels and shops grew up and shouldered it, and still it stood there dreaming, it seemed, of a vanished paddock; aware, it seemed, in its gated caution, that once upon a time highwaymen rode out of Kensington with masks over their faces. I admit that it was ugly--entirely gloomy in its grey, stiff, barrack-like way; but it did mean something--it had character. Though nobody, as far as I am aware, ever did anything splendidly bad or remarkably good in it, Devonshire House could never be neutral. The National Anthem is pretty bad music, but it could never be neutral! * * * So, as the workmen consumed their sandwiches in halls through which for two centuries passed a delicious trickle of royalties, as they heard the whistle and rose heavily to grasp their picks and do some more damage, I more than once stood there among a tangle of builders' carts and saw visions rise out of the white dust. What a procession!