away with, and two rows of houses, called Spa Cottages, were built on the site. Even now there is a house at the corner of Lloyd’s Row and Spa Cottages, the residence of the last proprietor, which recalls the vanished glory of other days by the inscription in capital letters, ‘ISLINGTON SPA, OR NEW TUNBRIDGE WELLS.’ At the back, in the cellar of No. 6, Spa Cottages, I have seen grotto-work with stone pilasters; on each side are steps descending. Here, I believe, was the original chalybeate spring; for many years it has ceased to flow. Horwood’s map of 1799 shows some of these suburban spas and places of amusement very distinctly. Islington Spa is marked just south of the New River Head, and over a hundred yards south-west of Sadler’s Wells. The garden is of considerable size, running east, apparently to St. John Street Road. A short distance to the west, and also near the New River Head, is Merlin’s Cave--a rural tavern and holiday-resort of Londoners--named, it is said, after an artificial cave, dug out in 1835 in the royal gardens at Richmond, by order of Queen Caroline, and of which there was here, perhaps, a humble imitation. Again, some distance to the south of the New River Head, at the corner of Rosoman Street and Exmouth Street, one sees the words ‘London Spa,’ on a public-house with that sign erected in 1835 to replace a former building. This is on or near the site of another mineral spring once, as we have seen, sufficiently famous to be named in a description of the New Wells,[87] a neighbouring establishment. In ‘Poor Robin’s Almanack’ for 1733, occurs the following doggerel, which refers to the month of July: ‘Now sweethearts with their sweethearts go To Islington or London Spaw; Some go but just to drink the water, Some for the ale which they like better.’ In point of fact, the spa ale sold here seems before the middle of the century to have become famous, when the mineral water was no longer heard of. Spa Fields, which adjoined, were an open waste, a Sunday resort of Londoners of the lower class addicted to rough sports. I have already referred to these fields at page 69, when speaking of the Ducking-pond public-house and its successors, the Pantheon, and Spa Fields Chapel, the first of ‘the Countess of Huntingdon’s Connexion.’ She died in the house adjoining it on June 17, 1791.