The probability would be that the buyer would turn his purchase to immediate profit, level, and sell materials, and lay out the grounds for villa residences. Yet one more agreeable old mansion, whose fall is hovering in the balance, or has been already determined, is the pleasing Raleigh House, out at Brixton.[14] It stood, or stands, in some charming grounds, old-fashioned, and rather secluded. For some years an agitation has been going on in the district to secure it as a park. It is nearer to London, however, that the old houses disappear with the rapidity of a pantomimic change. The temptation of a garden and “grounds” is irresistible. Now where a single house stood you can trace a street of villas or terraces. A keen, sympathetic antiquary, living at Stoke Newington, Mr. Andrews, kept mournful watch on this, and some years ago recorded these baleful efforts:-- “Like autumn leaves, the ripe old red-brick mansions of the seventeenth and early part of the eighteenth century, which stood in their spacious grounds surrounded by lofty buttressed walls, and which gave a peculiar character to our London suburbs, are falling around us. Only a few months have passed since I recorded the demolition of Fleetwood House; last month the end of [Illustration: RALEIGH HOUSE.] Kensington House was narrated, and I have two others to add to the series this month. The flat little branch line which ran out of Lower Edmonton was terminated at its Enfield end by a fine old red-brick mansion of the period of Queen Anne, which was utilized as the terminal station. This alteration would seem to necessitate the erection of a new station and the removal of the old one; so that probably before these lines are in the hands of the reader, the pick will be at its cruel work upon the fine old pile. The front of the house has good specimens of carved and moulded brickwork. The central portion of the front is, perhaps, one of the finest pieces of English brickwork in existence. It consists of an elaborate entablature, with a segmental pediment and four pilasters, which divide the front into three spaces, the central space, which contains a large window, being twice as wide as the lateral ones, each of which contains a niche, semicircular in plan, with a semicircular head, filled in with a well-carved cherub’s head. Above the niche is a panel containing swags of fruit and flowers, well carved out of brickwork. The entablature is very elaborately moulded and carved, the cornice having delicately-moulded dentils. Each pilaster has a carved composite capital. The bricks of which this portion of the front is formed are small, and the joints are almost imperceptible. All the carving is out of the solid brickwork, and none of this work appears to have been cast. The front contains, in addition, four windows, with carved brick architraves and label-heads. The other features are the usual ones found in houses of this period. All the rooms are panelled.