Returning to the road at the end of the wall enclosing the grounds of Hill House, we come out upon a bit of the Heath, with a straggling group of dark-stemmed, storm-stricken fir-trees at its farthest end, near the wall of Heath Lodge, locally known as the Eleven Sisters. Beneath the footpath on the edge of the Heath the main road is continued along a deep cutting past the back-front of North End House, now called Wildwood, a name to which, Mr. Howitt thinks, it had the original right. This cutting, said to be some centuries old, runs parallel with the gardens and grounds of North End House,[168] a name under which the place retains reminiscences of the saddest chapter in the life of England’s great statesman, Pitt, Earl of Chatham, which it would have been well for the interest of Hampstead to have retained. The house stands on a descending tongue of ground, running down, as we have said, between the old avenue and the North End Road, and is embowered in finely-grown trees. The garden runs up the ascent, and has an old, octagonal summer house of three stories at the upper end of it, which can be seen from the footpath on the Heath. This is still in a fair state of preservation. [Illustration: _Firs._] The house—as old as the early Georgian period—has been altered and raised a story since it was held, probably on lease, by Lord North. It was during his tenancy that his famous brother-in-law, Lord Chatham, when suffering from the agonies of gout, and sometimes, it has been suspected, when only making them a pretext to escape from political vexations and perplexities, was wont to resort thither, sometimes coming all the way from Richmond to find a night’s rest at North End. Lord Mahon, in his ‘History of England,’ gives copies of letters written by the great Minister from this retreat. From one of these we find he was at North End, Hampstead, on Saturday, August 23, 1766, immediately after he became Prime Minister; whilst his last visit here, according to the author of the ‘Northern Heights of London,’ took place some time after March, 1778 (that would be very shortly before his death, which occurred May 11 of that year). I hope I am not quoting someone else in applying to him that line, ‘Great wits are sure to madness near allied,’[169] but his conduct and eccentricities at times came very near it. He had such a dread of neighbours that he bought up all the houses near his own to ensure his having none. His terror of loud noises and of strangers was excessive, and if in his solitary walks he saw another person on the path approaching him, he would run round corners or down side-paths to avoid a meeting. Even when driving for exercise on the Heath, the blinds of the carriage were close drawn, so that no one might see him. It cannot be said that in age his looks were in his favour. He was dark, even to swarthiness, with a large hooked nose, and eyes with which ‘he glared at his antagonists, and a scowl with which he overawed them.’