Middlesex

highway that led so many a hopeful youth across the northern heights, to see the lights of London at last shining before him, has more than onc

an sparing horseflesh; but, as Bishops ceased to be great lords, both clergymen and laymen began to have a conscience of what is due to animals. Proposals to divert the road round this trying steep were for a time baffled by the opposition of landowners holding jealously to their parked seclusion. Not till about a century ago was constructed the road which skirts Highgate Hill on the east, at first meant to be carried out through a tunnel on a smaller scale, like the grott

beyond Hampstead and Highgate, including dependencies with by-names of their own. Till enclosed early in last century, it contained much open land, like that Finchley Common famed in Hogarth's picture and in the Newgate Calendar; Sydney Smith calls it the

M PARLIAMENT

pments is now set with strings and knots of houses, grouping themselves most thickly at three points-Church End, East Fin

he Great North Road before its tram-line was made. Two or three years ago a pitiable sight here on hot Sunday afternoons was groups of flower-burdened women in black, waiting to struggle for room on the insufficient public vehicles that tugged heavy loads towards the resting-places of their dead. Where so many sad and weary mourners were often disapp

covering from this infection when it has crossed the Brent. The road to Hendon turns left from the highway through the village and string of villas called Golder's Green, a name that takes in the red-brick tower on the right, marking the new Golder's Green Crematorium, beside a Jewish cemetery, five miles from the Marble Arch. The tube railway p

rom Lord's Cricket Ground, the Finchley Road behoves to be known as the Regent's Park Road. The little Church, containing some old brasses, stands to the left on a road coming in from Hendon, where it has been rather dwarfed by Christ's College opposite, onc

parallel with the highway-by a lodge gate is marked an avenued footway for Mill Hill, that leads finely across the Dollis Brook to mount on a golf-course beside the grounds of Nether Court. It seems as if all the parks of Middlesex are like to be usurped upon by that greedy game of golf, so much more at ease in its native barrens, or on the heaths of Surrey. There may soon be as many clubs of Londoners as in all Scotland; and yet a bitter cry goes up from long waiting-l

en-mile-stone there is an ascent to the turning for Colney Hatch at Fallow Corner, where the top of tramcars gives a wide view towards the Alexandra Palace. To the right here lies some pleasant scenery about the gr

amenities of Totteridge; and from Totteridge station, close to the highroad, a path leads on up the Dollis Brook to High Barnet. But when the road itself brings us again into something like open country, it passes for a time out of Middlesex, its boundary here so labyrinthine that one has known a very policeman doubtful as to which county he was patrolling. Between Totteridge and Barnet a long forked tongue of Hertfordshire is thrust into Middlesex, licking up some of the fairest scenes hereabouts for a county that has no need to be greedy of loveliness. It is thus

further north, on the main line of the Great Northern Railway, New Barnet has become a distant Metropolitan suburb overlaying the hamlet of Lyonsdown. Then, a mile to the west, eleven miles from Clerkenwell, Chipping Barnet-i.e., Cheaping or Market Barnet-answering to the alias of High Barnet by its elevation of 400 feet, still shows character as

when the town was practically as far off London as York is now. It will be remembered that at Barnet Oliver Twist fell in with that compromising companion, the "Artful Dodger," who, at the fair time, was likely enough to have business here. Dickens is said to have had Barnet again in view as "Thistledown," at which he denounced the mismanagement of a "Free" Grammar School, such as in his day so often gave cause for scandal. But unless that the way to it led up a hill, where on either side the fields were "puffed up into notice by a series of undulations," his description as li

ly to the right of the road, on Hadley Common, to which one turns off from the upper corner of Hadley Green, where the town almost runs into the village of Monken Hadley, with its ancient Church. As a rarer relic than its monuments, this restored, or rather rebuilt, church keeps on its tower a cresset that may often have served for beacon to wanderers in the wilds of Enfield Chase, and no doubt did its part in spreading the alarm of the Armada, for at Hadley we are on one of the highest levels of Middlesex, in view of "bleak Hampstead's swarthy moor," where Macaulay starts the chain

s bosky mazes. One can thread them by taking the road turning off at that venerable stump, to become a bridle-track along the edge of the woods, joined about half-way by a path coming up from New Barnet Station. This way is sacred to the pedestrian, though the cycl

e here James Thomson is said to have been tutor, and he might still find scenes for the rural pictures of his Seasons, preserved by private grounds on the slopes opposite this church, half hidden in its shady enclosure. Behind it the Church Farm has been turned into the Philanthropic Society's Industrial School, by which goes a path that, beyond the Great Northern Railway main line, soon loses itself in the new roads of Oakleigh Park, leading into the highway at Whetstone. Perhaps a pleasanter way, as things are now, is to keep the road past the church till on its right runs up an embo

the right appears in a hollow the suburban smartness of Hadley Wood, a new quarter grown up about its station on the main Great Northern Railway line, which presently tunnels under our road. By Ganwick Corner and the "Duke of York," we come to Potter's Bar, the last Middlesex village, much transmogrified through villas and trim suburban roads, by which London breaks out again on the edge of its shire. This is three miles from Barnet, and five or six miles more through "pleasant Hertfordshire" woul

h Street at the "Green Man," which is all that a highway should be; but not much more can be said of it unless for its peep into Dyrham Park at the Dancers Hill cross-roads. Above the thirteenth mile-stone and the crossing of the Mimms Brook the pedestrian may look out for a group of farm buildings on the left, by which a path, crossing the road here, curves over fields to Clare Hall

Enfield. From Potter's Bar, on this side, another finely-bordered highway turns back to London, through what was once Enfield Chase, by Cock Fosters and Southgate. At the le

he fence may be seen the remains of Camelot Moat, an overgrown enclosure of immemorial antiquity that makes one of the scenes in the Fortunes of Nigel. A later novelist may have picked up a hint here in the legend of such a "Lost Sir Massingberd" as is said to have hid himself in a hollow tree and perished miserably by falling into a well underneath. By the country