- An Order That Permits a Market
- The Harbour, and What Is Counted Before a Rope Is Thrown
- The White Eagle, and the War Against Dead Things
- The Boundary Stone, and the Coolness Between Two Churches
- The Lightning Current, and What Britannia Sends Men to See
- The Pruss Day Beyond the Ministry
- What a British Company Will and Will Not Be Hired For
“A Lyonnais harbour is a market that also keeps order. A Pruss harbour is an order that also permits a market. The difference sounds like a pleasantry until you have been made to wait four hours at a mooring you had paid for, in weather, while a ministry clerk satisfied himself about your ballast.”
An Order That Permits a Market
“They do not dislike trade. They dislike untidiness, and trade as we conduct it is untidy. Give a Pruss ministry a schedule it can keep and it will keep it better than any office on the Continent. Give it a cargo that arrived early and it will behave as though you had insulted a relative.”
The shore begins where the Nieuwlanden leave off, running north-east along a coast of grey water and low sand, and the change a master notices first is not in the land but in the paperwork. West of the border a harbour is a place that will take your money and find you a berth. East of it a harbour is a department of state which, among its other duties, keeps a quay. The distinction is not resented by the men who live under it. It is the thing they are proud of.
A British master used to the near ports finds the first Pruss call slow and the fourth one fast, and both experiences are accurate. Nothing is hurried, but nothing is arbitrary either, and a schedule published in a ministry list will hold in weather that would make a Lyonnais harbour master shrug and go home. Britannian factors who have worked both shores say the same thing in different words. One buys speed in the south by knowing somebody, and one buys certainty in the north by knowing the rule.
The state is present in ways the traveller must learn to read. Escort discipline is a public virtue, taught in the schools and visible in the way a cargo moves under armed conduct from quay to warehouse without anyone appearing to give an order. The ministries are cold, prompt and unbribable at the level a foreigner can reach. Higher up, the same men who will not take a shilling for a permit will take a great deal of trouble for a policy, which is the harder thing to trade against.
Britons admire this from what their own commentary calls a prudent distance, and the phrase deserves its weight. Admiration and unease are two readings of one observation: that a country able to run its harbours like an army will, if it wishes, run an army through its harbours. The war for the free ports is within living memory of a working man, and no Pruss official mentions it, and no British consul forgets it.
The order a Pruss harbour keeps extends to things a British port would not think of regulating, and the extension is the country in miniature. Where a cargo may stand overnight. Which stairs are used by whom. What may be done on the quay on a day the calendar marks, which is a great deal less than on any other day. The rules are published, they are not many, and they are enforced with a consistency that visitors find restful once they stop resenting it.
Britannian houses with northern trade have learned to send their steadiest men to the Pruss ports and their quickest to Lyonnais, which is a piece of practical wisdom worth more than most of what is printed about either country. A man who improvises does well on the southern shore and badly on the northern. A man who reads the rule and keeps it will be trusted in Prussland within a season and will be thought slow in Lyonnais for ever.
Behind the harbour there is a country, and a British reader who has only met Prussland at a mooring has met the smallest part of it. Inland lie the works towns on the Weissstrom, of which Grossenlicht is the one Britons are sent to see, the chapter lands of the Order running up toward Ostwall, and a road establishment that keeps its schedules in weather that would close most roads on the western Continent. The harbour discipline a master resents at the stair is the same discipline, met at its edge.
The physical impression changes as quickly as the paperwork. The coast is pale sand, grey water and long engineered approaches; inland the ground rises into dark agricultural country, river works and forested marks broken by road stations whose distances are painted on boards. Grossenlicht announces itself by smoke before skyline: foundries, arc halls, treated-copper works and the sharp metallic smell that British visitors compare to a thunderstorm trapped indoors. The ordinary towns smell less dramatic — coal smoke, wet wool, boiled grain, stable straw and stove ash — and look severe chiefly because winter has trained builders to put thickness before ornament.
The built country is severe without being primitive. Older churches, chapter houses and civic halls rise in dark stone or blackened brick with steep roofs, pointed windows, buttressed walls and narrow towers intended to shed snow and outlast fire. New industry has grown through that Gothic fabric rather than replacing it. Iron galleries cross old courtyards, steam pipes disappear through monastery walls, cranes stand behind carved gatehouses, and tall works chimneys rise beyond roofs that still carry saints in niches. Grossenlicht at dusk is especially characteristic: bells and factory whistles overlap, smoke hangs below the spires, and arc light from a ministry yard turns wet cobbles white while the neighbouring street remains lit by oil. The Pruss do not regard the mixture as picturesque. The old building was sound, so the new machine was put inside it.
Clothing is not merely restrained in Prussland; in public it is black. The rule is religious before it is fashionable, and it reaches from ministry coat to market dress closely enough that foreigners call the Pruss the Black Ones. Rank and wealth therefore cannot advertise themselves through colour. They move into cut, cloth, braid, buttons, polished boots and above all jewellery, which is permitted and consequently worn with an importance a Lyonnais visitor does not at first understand. A rich woman may carry pearls, worked silver or coloured stones against an otherwise severe black gown; a senior officer may be almost plain until the workmanship of his watch, ring and chain is noticed. Work coats and aprons are made for sparks and weather, but the public silhouette remains black enough that a crowded Pruss street can look like a funeral procession until it moves.
Prussland is not a port-state. British statistical comparisons are poor outside the western ministries, but even cautious legation estimates put several million people under Pruss administration in the provinces most directly connected to the western trade. Grossenlicht is a city in the order of one hundred and fifty to two hundred thousand; Neu Falkenheim perhaps forty to seventy thousand; the works and garrison towns along the Weissstrom add a continuous settled belt rather than isolated dots. A journey from the western harbour to Grossenlicht is a matter of days on scheduled roads, not an expedition, and the eastern marks continue for weeks beyond the point at which a British commercial traveller normally turns back.
The British presence is correspondingly thin. Hundreds rather than thousands live permanently in Prussland: consular staff, factors, technical students, engineers, interpreters and a handful of merchant families. A few thousand more may pass through in a year, many of them sailors who never leave the harbour districts. Britannia buys proofed firearms, instruments, treated metal and above all technique; it sells woollen cloth, coal where local supply is dear, colonial goods carried on British lanes and financial services the northern houses find useful without pretending to admire. Prussland is therefore familiar in material civilisation and foreign in institutional density: a Briton recognises the workshop, the church and the inn, then discovers that all three have been entered in books maintained by offices he did not know existed.
What that interior produces is worth knowing before a company is offered work in it. Worked metal, instruments, powder, and the treated stone the arc halls consume. Grain from the eastern estates, moved on schedule rather than on price. And a body of trained men that the ministries can place where they are wanted within a season, which is the fact the free ports have never been able to forget and the reason their whole politics is what it is.
What a company wants from all this is simply stated. The north is where a contract means what it says, where an escort arrives at the hour written and where a body is buried under a rite no one will afterwards dispute. It is also where a foreigner who improvises is a foreigner in trouble. The country instructs. It will instruct you too, courteously, once.
The Harbour, and What Is Counted Before a Rope Is Thrown
“In Weisshafen they ask what you are carrying. In a Pruss basin they already know, they have known since the pilot boarded you, and the question put to you at the stair is whether your account agrees with theirs. Answer honestly. They are not looking for smugglers. They are looking for a discrepancy.”
The Pruss harbour procedure is famous among British masters and is worth setting out, because every part of it explains a part of the country. A pilot boards outside the roads and is a state officer rather than a contractor. He carries a book. What goes into that book at the moment of boarding is the vessel as declared, and everything that happens for the next three days is a comparison against it.
Ballast is counted, draught is read, hands are numbered and the ship’s articles are copied. A master who has shipped two men at a foreign call and not entered them will find that fact produced at the stair with no accusation attached and no possibility of evasion. The register is not a trap. It is the ordinary instrument of a state that believes a thing unrecorded is a thing that has not happened, and that belief runs from the ministries down to a boy checking barrels on a wet stone quay.
Cargo is bonded into yards under lock and seal, and the seal is a state seal rather than a company one. British houses dislike this more than they admit, because it puts a foreign clerk between a firm and its goods, and it is also why loss by theft in a Pruss basin is close to unknown. The insurers know the figures. A premium written on a northern discharge is among the cheapest in the outer trade and is quoted as an argument whenever a British port is accused of being loose.
The dues are published, fixed and not negotiable, which foreigners find restful and local brokers find intolerable. There is no bargaining at the counter and no advantage in knowing the officer. The one true privilege is precedence, granted by the ministry on grounds that are stated in writing, and the grounds are almost always the same one: a vessel carrying for the state, or for a house the state has reason to favour, moves first.
The pilot’s book is the instrument the whole procedure turns on, and its authority comes from the fact that it is written first. A master is entered as he declares himself, before anybody has an interest in the answer, and everything that follows is a comparison. A discrepancy is therefore not an accusation. It is an arithmetical fact about two documents, which is exactly how the officers treat it and exactly why the procedure is hard to quarrel with.
What a foreign master is not told, and should be, is that the book records more than cargo. The ship’s dead are entered, with the date and the position if the master has them, and a vessel arriving with an unentered death aboard has a difficulty of a different order from an unentered bale. The Order takes an interest in that particular column, the harbour officers know it, and nothing about the matter will be settled at the stair.
What a master must not do is improvise. A rope thrown before the officer has finished is not an offence against a person but against the order of things, and the order of things is what the harbour exists to demonstrate. Britons who have learned the drill find the north the easiest coast in the known world to work. Britons who have not find it the coldest, and both write letters home saying so.
The White Eagle, and the War Against Dead Things
“Our brothers in the west keep a quiet parish and count that a victory. We do not count it. A ground that is merely quiet has not been settled, it has been left alone, and what was left alone at the boundary stone of my grandfather’s village was still there when I came back with the Order and a spade.”
The White Eagle knights are the great religious order of Prussland and the thing about the north a British reader most needs explained, because nothing in Britannia is quite like them. They are grave, martial and watchful. They ride against pagan practice on the eastern borders, they keep burial discipline over a stretch of country larger than several British counties, and their war against dead things is not a figure of speech but a standing establishment with rolls, chapters, sergeants and a budget.
Their doctrine begins from a hard proposition. Corruption of the ground is not an accident of bad weather or bad luck but a consequence of things done and left undone, and the remedy is therefore also a thing that can be done. An Eagle chapter that hears of a haunted crossing does not send a chaplain to soothe the parish. It sends brothers who will open, examine, consecrate and record, and who will then come back in a year to see whether the record held.
Corpse-traffic is the offence they pursue with the least mercy and the most success. Bodies move in the northern trade as they move everywhere, for anatomy, for relics, for the buyers who do not explain themselves, and the Eagles regard a cart of unregistered dead as an act of war rather than a crime of commerce. The northern ports know it. A British agent asked to move such a consignment through a Pruss basin has been asked to end his career, and the older houses will not even discuss the fee.
They also treat the sea as ground. The suspect sea cults of the northern islands, the offerings made at harbour mouths by crews who would deny it ashore, the small shrines that appear on a breakwater after a bad winter: all of these are Eagle business, and their treaties with fortified ports are written to make them so. A port that accepts an Eagle garrison accepts an Eagle view of what may be left standing on its own stones.
The Order’s establishment is larger than any British reader assumes and is organised like an army because it was one. Chapters with lands and rents. A roll of brothers, sergeants and servants. A chaplaincy, an infirmary, a school, and a body of men whose whole occupation is the keeping of ground: opening, examining, consecrating, recording, and returning within the year to see whether the record held.
Their doctrine of corruption is worth stating in their own terms because it explains everything else they do. Ground goes wrong for reasons, the reasons are things done or left undone by people, and what people have done people can undo. That proposition is why an Eagle chapter does not send a chaplain to soothe a frightened parish. It sends brothers with instruments and a spade, and it comes back in a year to check.
What Prussland can field is the measure every other power on that water is quietly taken against, and the shape of it is the point rather than the size. The ministries keep regiments that are recruited by district, trained to one drill, and moved where they are wanted inside a season, which no other power in the north can do at all. Beside them stands the Order, which answers to its chapter and not to any ministry, and which is the body sent where the trouble is not ordinary.
Their firearms are made at home and are better than anybody else’s, which is the fact the free ports find hardest to live beside. The arc halls at Grossenlicht treat the metal, the works towns on the Weissstrom finish it, and the pieces go out under a ministry mark that foreign buyers trust more than their own proof houses. A Pruss regiment is not larger than a Lyonnais field army. It arrives on the day it said it would, with every piece firing, which on that coast has been worth more than numbers for a century.
For a British company the Order is the most reliable ally in the north and the most dangerous one. It pays, it honours its articles and it will send relief to men it has never met. It will also expect a company that has fought beside it to hold the same opinion about a shrine, and a company that will not hold that opinion had better discover the fact before the fighting rather than after it.
The Boundary Stone, and the Coolness Between Two Churches
“I was not refused. I was thanked, twice, with great courtesy, and told that the chapter would be at prayer. I have been in the trade long enough to know a closed door when it is held open for me, and I went back to my inn and wrote to the bishop that we should stop asking.”
British practice tolerates a great deal of bounded custom. An offering left at a boundary stone, an arrangement with whatever keeps a spring, an old observance at a crossing that the parish does not advertise and does not stop: these are ordinary in the island and are defended, when defended at all, on the ground that they keep a district quiet at no cost to anybody. The defence is practical and is made by practical men.
White Eagle doctrine regards that entire habit as apostasy conducted by men too comfortable to notice. The Order does not say so in a document a British bishop could take offence at, and it says so constantly in the way it behaves. An Eagle chaplain will decline a British invitation with perfect courtesy. A British parish will quietly not mention what it does at the stone. Both sides call the result respect, and northern correspondence calls it coolness rather than schism.
Neither church has forced the argument, because both know what forcing it would cost. The Holy Seat would have to choose, the aligned communions would have to take sides, and the one institution that keeps emissaries of both in the same complex would become the place where the quarrel was conducted. Nobody wants that outcome, and so the disagreement is managed by silence, which is a form of management and not a form of agreement.
The practical consequence for a company is a divided field. A British party operating under Eagle sanction must not be seen to make the small accommodations that would pass without remark at home, and a British party working a northern district without that sanction will find the accommodations are what the villagers expect. Men who have worked both ways describe the difficulty as a matter of which silence you are keeping.
The quarrel between the two churches is conducted almost entirely through omission, and a traveller must learn to hear it. An Eagle chaplain who declines an invitation. A British parish that does not mention what it does at its boundary stone. A Pruss chapter that will accept a British company for work at a grave and will not accept a British chaplain to say the words over it. Nothing is ever said. Everything is arranged.
Both sides can point at results, which is why the thing is unresolved rather than settled. The Order holds a border nobody held before it. The British parishes have kept districts quiet for longer than the Order has existed, by means the Order calls apostasy. Each explains the other’s success as luck or as a debt not yet called in, and a company working across both will be asked its opinion by both and should have none.
The Lightning Current, and What Britannia Sends Men to See
“I have stood in the arc hall at Grossenlicht with wet boots, no more sense than a sparrow, and I tell you the noise of it went through the floor into my teeth. Our own clubs call it a curiosity. It is not a curiosity. It is a school, and we have not got one. That is the whole of my report.”
The controlled use of lightning current is a Pruss field and Britannia knows it. The respected demonstrations are traced to Doktor Albrecht Donner of Neu Falkenheim in the Mark of Rabenwald and to the state workshops of Grossenlicht upon the Weissstrom, where insulated coils, treated copper and arc trials were first gathered into something a foreign observer could call a method rather than a collection of surprises.
The Pruss taste for severe workshop discipline is inseparable from the result, and British visitors keep saying so in tones of irritated admiration. Military telegraphy, controlled shock apparatus and insulated line are all one enterprise there, run by ministries, staffed by men who have been examined, and recorded in a way that lets a failure be studied rather than blamed. The reports of the inspector at Eisenhafen on line failures are read almost as war literature by British workshop men.
The London technical clubs follow it closely and print more than they understand. The master of Sankt Gerhardsmarkt is quoted at every meeting. The engineer of Klein-Rosenbruck is quoted more carefully, because she has a habit of publishing what did not work. Enthusiasts admit that the systems are young, costly, temperamental, dependent on copper, dry housing and expert handling. That is why gas and oil remain the common light of the realm.
Pruss engineering is strongest when weight is an advantage rather than a penalty. Their steam engines, pumps, rolling machinery, armament works and electrical apparatus are robust, standardised and heavily overbuilt. A Pruss designer faced with a weak member is culturally inclined to add iron, a brace and another man to inspect it; the result is rarely graceful and often keeps working after a more elegant foreign machine has stopped. This is why their workshops excel in fixed plant, military carriage and harbour machinery and why the same habits become a disadvantage in the air.
Prussland does possess skyships, but they are crude beside Britannian craft and nobody who has travelled in both confuses them. The northern ships are heavily framed, short-ranged and dependent on large ground crews; they carry observers, dispatches, officers and occasionally light military stores over home territory, and are poor choices for long passenger work or an oceanic relay. Prussland lacks a secure domestic equivalent of Sarrum’s green coal and light iron and does not command the Cambridge processes, certified machine-stones and treated aerial stock on which the best Britannian hulls depend. Small quantities can be imported, copied or obtained through intermediaries, but not in the volume or consistency needed to build an aerial system around them. Pruss engineers compensate with ordinary iron, more lift volume, heavier engines and disciplined maintenance. Their skyships are therefore impressive proofs of stubborn engineering rather than peers of Whiteheath or Cambridge-built craft.
Britannia therefore sends men to look, and the north lets them look, within limits that are stated plainly. A visitor is shown the hall, the bench and the apparatus. He is not shown the arsenal work, he is not left alone with a housing, and a notebook leaving the country is examined by an officer who knows what he is examining. This is not suspicion of the individual. It is the same instinct that counts ballast at the roads.
The lightning current is the one field in which Britannia is unmistakably the pupil, and the island bears it with a poor grace that the Pruss find amusing. Every London technical club has a member who has been to Grossenlicht. Every account of the visit says the same thing about the discipline of the benches. Every proposal to establish an equivalent school at home has so far died in committee for want of a ministry willing to own it.
The Order’s interest in the field is the part British accounts leave out and the part that most affects a hired party. A method that throws fire at a distance is, in Eagle doctrine, a thing that ought to be in hands that have sworn something, and the chapters have accordingly acquired a quiet standing in the arsenals. A consignment of apparatus travelling north may be met by people nobody at the London end mentioned.
A company hired to escort an instrument maker to a northern demonstration should understand what it is escorting. The apparatus is valuable, the notes are more valuable, and the men who would pay for either are not all in the trade. The Order takes an interest as well, on the ground that a method able to throw fire at a distance ought to be in hands that have sworn something, and its interest has been known to arrive before the buyer’s.
The Pruss Day Beyond the Ministry
“Foreigners write as though we spend the day being inspected. We spend it buying bread, waiting for bells, arguing over apprentices and trying to get home before the rain. The ministry is only the thing that has written down when the bakery closes.”
Prussland is easiest to caricature from a quay, and the usual caricature is incomplete because it mistakes bureaucracy for the thing underneath it. The country is religious before it is administrative. Bells divide the public day more firmly than clocks do, and when a church bell tolls conversation stops. A bargaining merchant closes his mouth in the middle of a price, a foreman lowers his voice to nothing, children are struck quiet in the street and even a ministry counter waits for the sound to finish. The silence is not a pious preference. It is required, and a stranger who talks through it will be corrected once with embarrassment and afterwards by an officer or parish beadle who does not regard the matter as cultural misunderstanding.
The useful distinction is not between an oppressive public life and a free private one, for the same moral order reaches both. It is between formality and familiarity. At a counter a time means the time written; at supper it means when the food is ready. The clerk who would not vary a form by one line may argue cheerfully for an hour over beer, workshop prospects or the cost of parish repairs, but the household does not become a place outside religion when the door closes. Grace is said, feast and fast are kept, marriages are entered and watched, and a family scandal can become parish business with a speed that surprises visitors from the west.
The ordinary towns are built for cold before display. Doors are heavy, rooms smaller than a London visitor expects, stoves valuable enough to be named in inventories, and winter stores treated as household duty rather than a sign of poverty. Dark bread, preserved fish, cabbage, broth and beer are ordinary fare in the ports and works towns; better tables add game, river fish and imported southern fruit when the season allows. Against the universal black of public clothing, jewellery carries much of the work colour carries elsewhere. Wedding stones, family silver, devotional medals and finely worked chains make a Pruss supper less visually austere than the street outside, and experienced visitors learn quickly that jewellery here is not frivolity but one of the few lawful public languages of display.
The White Eagle is not the whole of Pruss religion, but the severity foreigners associate with the Order is not confined to its chapter houses. Parish and civic discipline are close enough that the distinction between sin and minor public offence is often procedural rather than practical. Divorce is not permitted. Marriage may become miserable, separate in fact, or require families to arrange lives around an absence, but the bond is not dissolved. Whipping remains an ordinary punishment for offences a Briton would expect to end in a fine, a penance or an angry sermon, and visiting factors are repeatedly warned that drunken blasphemy, indecent public conduct and breaches of sacred observance are not treated as amusing foreign excess. The Pruss argument is simple: light sins become heavy ones when a society trains itself to overlook them.
Social standing is earned differently from the Near Coast. Money opens fewer doors quickly; reliability and visible conformity open more of them slowly. Being at the stated place when expected, paying without reminder, falling silent when the bells sound, presenting oneself properly in black and not attempting to purchase an exception are noticed together. A British visitor can spend freely for months and remain a stranger. The same visitor who keeps six small undertakings and six small observances will begin to be invited into rooms where no commercial introduction would have admitted him.
The discipline also produces flight, and the western cities know it better than British accounts of Prussland do. Men and women leave because a marriage cannot be ended, because a public punishment has become a family inheritance, because a child or lover will not live under the church’s expectations, or simply because a life in compulsory black and compulsory silence has become unbearable. The ministries do not advertise the outflow and the numbers are not known, but every free port has Pruss-born households and every western trade knows the skilled hand who arrived with good tools and no intention of going home. The more liberal societies beyond the Pruss border have been shaped in part by people who escaped its order rather than defeated it.
For a company this is more than manners. Northern employment depends on men who have seen the firm outside the moment of danger. A party that is punctual at the quay, exact about accounts and observant of the black rule and the bell silence will be recommended for armed work before a louder party with a better testimonial. The reverse matters as much. A foreign company cannot rescue a client from Pruss moral law merely by putting him under contract, and a party hired to move a fugitive westward should understand that the north may regard the work not as carriage but as interference with parish and family authority. Prussland’s bureaucracy is therefore only half the lesson. The other half is a moral jurisdiction that follows people farther than a harbour form does.
What a British Company Will and Will Not Be Hired For
“We do not want your men for a battle. We have men for a battle. We want your men because they are not ours, because they may go where a brother in a white surcoat may not go without the whole district knowing by supper, and because when it is finished they will sail away.”
The northern market for British companies is narrow, well paid and specific, and a firm that mistakes it for the Near Coast will waste a season. Nobody in Prussland needs foreigners to hold a line, escort a convoy or garrison a tower. Those things are done by men whose whole lives have been arranged around doing them, and done better than a hired company could do them.
What the north buys is deniability, distance and speed. A party that is not Pruss can walk into a border village and ask questions that a uniform cannot ask. It can go across a frontier the ministries would rather not be seen crossing. It can be at a crossing in three days when a chapter would need a month of correspondence, and it can be disowned the same afternoon if the matter turns out badly.
The second market is technical escort, and it is the growing one. Instruments, licensed apparatus, insulated line, the men who understand them: all of it travels between the workshops and the stations under guard. The guards are increasingly foreign, because a foreign company has no family in the country and no politics in the ministry. The pay is good, the articles are exact, the penalty clauses exact as well.
The third market is the Order’s, and it is the one that changes a company’s reputation. Work taken from an Eagle chapter is work at a grave, a boundary or a shrine, with brothers present and a record kept, and it is the nearest thing in the known world to a licence that means something everywhere. A British company that has been trusted with it is trusted afterwards by people who have never heard of the district it worked in.
The northern market has a fourth class that the chapter does not set out and companies discover by being offered it, which is work for the ministries at the eastern border. It is escort, it is observation, and it is conducted in country where a uniform would be an event. The pay is exact, the articles are exact, and the disowning clause is written in terms that leave a firm in no doubt about what it is accepting.
What every class of northern work shares is the record. A company is entered, the entry is kept, and the entry is consulted. A firm that has worked one season for a chapter, one for a ministry and one for a free port has three entries in three archives that correspond with each other, and it will find that the fourth engagement is offered rather than sought. Nowhere else in the known world does reputation compound so directly.
What a company will not be hired for is anything that touches the free ports. The north regards that as a settled matter of state and a wound, and a firm that takes a retainer on one side of it has made a decision about the whole northern coast. Britannian houses with northern interests will say so before a contract is signed, and a firm that has not been told this has not been talking to the right houses.