One of them, rather an old boy now, has told me that, after an independent _excursus_ in Bishop’s Wood, a general exploration of the Heath, a game of hide-and-seek with his sisters among the gravel-pits, and a donkey-ride from the Whitestone Pond to the Spaniards and back again, or from the same starting-point round the West Heath to Jack Straw’s Castle and the Whitestone Pond, few things could be more pleasantly suggestive than the fuming chimneys in the hollow of the Vale of Health, and the near sight of the several tables with big family teapots, flanked by heaped-up plates of serviceable slices of bread-and-butter (delicious after the ‘crug’ of Christ’s School), and new-laid eggs, and water-cresses from the spring, which made the general menu of these al-fresco entertainments. It was not unusual on summer evenings to see the whole space in front of these cottages thronged with respectably-dressed family and other parties taking tea in the open, and enlivening the placid scene with social gaiety. It was with the hope of alluring a portion of this company, and the expected crowds which the opening of the North London Railway promised, that the East Heath Tavern intruded its gaunt ugliness upon this peaceful spot, a speculation that ultimately failed. As the only place on Hampstead Heath outside the taverns where in the forties and fifties a cup of tea could be had, or hungry folk find refreshment for their children or themselves, the Vale of Health was well known and appreciated. But its higher claims to be regarded and sought out and visited, I think, as a rule, the general inhabitants of the town of Hampstead had forgotten or ignored. Neither William Howitt, Baines, nor a writer in the _Bookman_—who in 1893, 1894, and 1895 contributed some notices of Hampstead to that publication—appears to have known anything decided of the whereabouts of Leigh Hunt’s cottage, otherwise than that it was situated in the Vale of Health. The desire on all sides appears to have been to furnish the poet with a more important habitation than he himself tells us he occupied. In or about 1855-56, it was believed that Vale Lodge, then the hospitable home of the talented writers of ‘The Wife’s Secret’[183] and ‘Ingomar,’ was the veritable house in which the poet had resided, and in one of the rooms of which Keats had composed the first verses of ‘Endymion.’ There is lying before me a note from a lady since closely connected with Hampstead, in which she writes: ‘M. asks me to say that she finds Leigh Hunt and Douglas Jerrold both lived in Mr. Lovell’s present house in the Vale of Health.’