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View of Highgate and Ponds.

To the west (a proper pendant to the view of Highgate) our vision closes with the spire of St. John’s Church, and the town of Hampstead stretching down a peninsula of houses in a sea of verdure, terminating in the fast-narrowing strip of green fields between Kentish Town and the St. John’s Wood estate on this side of Hampstead Road.

I specially remember a bit of landscape in which the red viaduct[3] in Sir Maryon Wilson’s demesne shows to much advantage on the grassy foreground between the wooded undulations of the park. It is still pretty, but ‘with a difference.’ Then a footway crossing the Heath led through an old gray, weather-beaten gate to a shady path, with a plantation of young trees on one side, and a hedgerow, redolent in summer of wild-rose and May, dividing it from a meadow on the other. The remains of a long-disused tile-kiln stood on the edge of the field, the red earth of which showed its fitness for such manufacture. This path led through upland fields to Highgate, and was a charming one, beloved by painter and poet. The last time I saw it the beauty was devastated, and the meadow changed into a brickfield, with a view to its conversion into a site for building on.