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For four years, while the fine old house, the historical home of the unfortunate Sir Harry Vane, was being prepared for them, Rosslyn House was used as the Home for Soldiers’ Daughters.

A little farther on a bit of sward crops out, reminiscent of Hampstead Green, where Collins the painter once lived, and on one side of which still stands the house formerly occupied by Sir Rowland Hill,[46] the inaugurator of cheap postage, and that of Sir Francis Palgrave, a well-known writer and Deputy-Keeper of the Public Records, 1838.

The central space is now occupied by St. Stephen’s Church, a structure nominally built by public subscription, but which, I have been told, owed its completion to the munificence of one family, old inhabitants of Hampstead, that of Prance. They gave the clock, and subsequently the carillon.

Some ancient elm-trees of magnificent size are left standing near the church. At the east end of the building two paths branch out of the main road, one leading to Pond Street and South End Green, the other to the Home of the Sisters of Providence and the congeries of sheds which, used as a small-pox hospital, desecrated this charming neighbourhood in 1870-72, and in 1886 were converted into a temporary asylum for idiots. The ground they occupy appears to be devoted to unseemly uses, a proposition having subsequently been made to convert it to the purpose of a cemetery, and this with the knowledge of the deteriorated value of property in the locality, which the closing of the small-pox hospital had not then readjusted.[47]