Travellers describe nothing to be so much dreaded by the people of the East as a flight of locusts, except indeed a settlement of locusts. When those devouring insects alight on the fields and pastures, they begin from a centre composed of myriads, and eat up everything green within radii extending over not acres, but miles. They fall upon gardens and leave them deserts; and upon a field they do not permit so much as a blade of grass to indicate where grass was. Although, in fact, these little devastators do not trouble us; in effect, Londoners are the victims of equally efficient destroyers of their green places. Bricklayers are spreading the webs and meshes of houses with such fearful rapidity in every direction, that the people are being gradually confined within narrow prisons, only open at the top for the admission of what would be air if it were not smoke. Suburban open spaces are being entombed in brick-and-mortar mausoleums for the suffocation as well as for the accommodation of an increasing populace; who, if they wish to get breath, can find nowhere to draw it from, short of a long journey. The Lungs of London have undergone congestion, and even their cells are underground. Of all the neighbourhoods of which London is a collection, Finsbury and Islington have suffered most. Within the recollection of middle-aged memories, Clerkenwell Green was of the right colour; Moorfields, Spafields, and the East India Company’s Fields, were adorned with grass; and he must be young indeed who cannot remember cricket-playing in White Conduit, Canonbury, Shepherd and Shepherdess, Rhodes, and Laycock’s, besides countless acres of other “Fields,” which are now blotted out from the face of the Country to become Town, in the densest sense of the word. Thanks to the window tax and the bricklayer, fresh air will be thoroughly bricked out, unless a vigorous effort be made to stop the invasion of burnt clay and water.