These houses rose on the rim of the bowl in which Mrs. Leggatt’s handsome red-brick mansion (as we see it to-day the façade remains unaltered) was set down, a reason, no doubt, for disposing of it, and which was objected to on the part of some of the people in authority as likely to prove detrimental to the health of its future inmates. From the schedule before me of the old materials, it is possible to rehabilitate the mansion, the body of which forms the centre of the present workhouse, and relieves, with brilliant ruddiness, the added ugly gray buildings overlooking it. It had a ventilator and turret on the roof; there were bows to the parlour, dining, and drawing rooms looking to the east, a probably uninterrupted view originally. These rooms had handsomely stuccoed ceilings, cornices, and mouldings, and marble chimney-pieces, carved, no doubt, after the lovely fashion of their day, with an old Roman triumph, or a procession of Ceres, or a vine-crowned Bacchus and Bacchantes. The great stairs, with mahogany hand-rail and banisters, sprang up from the ground-floor in the centre of the building to the two-pair story; and these, and all the marble chimney-pieces, except those left in the Master’s room, and the room over it, were to be taken at a valuation by the contractors, unless available in the work. All the offices were at the west side, or back, of the house; there was a clinker-paved stable, a laundry, and greenhouse, and what are called stewing-stoves in the kitchen—in short, all the appointments of a well-arranged establishment, the finishing touch to which is suggested in the enriched chimney caps. Since then the character of the whole district seems to have fallen, and New End is chiefly occupied by humble shops and cheap lodging-houses. The square, an imperfect triangle, still asserts itself superior to the dingy, sordid neighbourhood, about which the less said the better. CHAPTER XI. _THE VALE OF HEALTH._ From Hampstead Heath Station a branch of the East Heath Road leads direct to this popular and well-known part of the Lower Heath, while innumerable pathlets traced by the feet of visitors impatient to reach the goal of their pilgrimage all trend in the same direction. The present name of the Vale dates back to the period of the wells fashion, a period when sheltered places were believed to be more conducive to health than more open ones, especially for invalids. When the fame of Dr. Gibbon’s ‘Fountain of Health’ brought many visitors to Hampstead, quite a crop of small dwellings rose in this vicinity to meet the needs of a class of invalids unable, or indisposed, to put up at the taverns, or the ‘Wells Dwelling-house,’ or in the then fashionable lodging-houses in Pond Street and the Lower Flask Walk.