Had we desired a longer walk on the Finchley Road, we might have found our way back through a field-gate a little to the east of Platt’s Lane, and of the path I have already described, leading to a gate opening into Oak Hill Fields at New West End, a region of rich grass fields, the quality of which recommended the purchase of 14 acres of meadow-land at Child’s Hill to the trustees of the Campden Charity, with which they joined the bequest of an unnamed but eccentric gentlewoman who left the parish £40 for the purpose of distributing among the inhabitants of Hampstead, _rich and poor_, halfpenny loaves (cross-buns, probably) on the morning of Good Friday annually. If we follow the path, we find ourselves in the midst of a scene of pastoral beauty still unspoiled. Cattle, such as Sidney Cooper loves to paint, sleek and dappled, were, when I last saw it, placidly cropping mouthfuls of juicy grasses, or lying about on the slope of the upland field, lazily chewing the cud. In the hedgerows oak-trees, some of them hollow with age, and others young and verdant, appeared scattered over the face of the hill, which takes its name from the numbers of them once growing there. It was a walk for summer mornings and summer evenings—peaceful, sequestered, lovely—a walk that many a poet had trodden, and one in which many an artist besides Landseer had found inspiration and charming subjects. The hedgerows still sheltered their indigenous wild-flowers; hawthorn and elder, wild rose and woodbine, beautified the hedges in their several seasons, and though it felt and looked far away from the town, a very short walk to the gate or stile led to the main road, and past Oak Hill House, and Oak Hill Lodge, to the junction of Frognal Rise with Branch Hill. We may either follow the latter road to the West Heath, or strike into the road past Lower Terrace, and come out between the enclosure of the Hampstead Waterworks and the walls of Mrs. Johnstone’s premises, at the angle of which, railed in, stands a fine old elm,[180] memorable as Irving’s Elm, under the shade of which some of the old inhabitants of Hampstead may remember to have seen the preacher of the ‘unknown tongue’ take his stand, and with vehement language and gesture address a crowd half curious, half eager to listen to his passionate pleadings or fierce denunciations.[181]