For some time the Post Office has been carrying its heavy traffic this way by a motor vehicle, which once encountered the old-fashioned peril of highway robbery. There has been talk of a special road from London to Brighton, reserved as a track on which such careering vehicles may consume their own dust at their own pace. The Sutton route is certainly the best in that it soonest brings one out into something like open country. Once clear of tram lines at Tooting or Streatham, roads from the west end and the city converge by Figgs Marsh on the flats of Mitcham. This is a widely straggling sucker of the metropolis which clings to relics of its rustic character, showing clumps of cottages, old inns, and patches of open ground not yet squeezed out of existence, while it has a fame of its own for the manufacture of tobacco and for the culture of aromatic herbs, that are distilled at Carshalton not far off. About several villages around, indeed, the air is perfumed by crops of lavender and peppermint, the essence of which makes an export to France. This neighbourhood had also an old name for walnuts, as mentioned by Fuller; and it still has room for gardens as well as golf ground. Let us trust that only scandal-mongering jealousy prompted a reproach once current among its neighbours:-- Sutton for mutton, Carshalton for beef; Croydon for a pretty girl, And Mitcham for a thief! It may be that Mitcham got this bad reputation through the gypsies that long hung about it, and other undesirable aliens who gathered to the revels of Mitcham Fair.