This was the first and last semi-state visit of royalty to Hampstead. The drive along the Broad Walk and by Caen Wood and Fitzroy Farm is said to have been a favourite one with Queen Victoria in her early days, on which a strict privacy was observed. But on philanthropical occasions, when the Divine gift of charity is supposed to be largely moved by the honour of presenting purses to royal receivers of them, kind-hearted Princes and Princesses have never been wanting; and once, on the occasion of a benevolent and unforgotten function by those who witnessed it, the opening of Vane House as an asylum for soldiers’ daughters, the Prince Consort himself inaugurated it, and was right loyally received. But of late years neither the ‘beautiful village’ of Hampstead nor the sylvan beauty of Caen Wood had power to lure the third Lord Mansfield, who was High Constable of Scone, from his Northern palace for more than three months in the year. In the absence of the proprietor, this charming demesne—one of the brightest jewels, as it were, in the coronet of his ancestral honours—has been left to solitude and comparative neglect. The late Lord Mansfield died at his Castle of Scone, August 2, 1898. He was born February 20, 1806. Caen Wood House is now in the hands of his grandson, Lord Stormont having died during his father’s lifetime. In 1825 the peaceful shades of Caen Wood were the scene of a sad domestic tragedy, for here, in a wood near the house, Colonel James Hamilton Stanhope, who was on a visit to his father-in-law, the second Lord Mansfield, committed suicide. The unhappy gentleman had long been suffering from mental depression, the result of an unhealed gunshot wound he had received at the siege of San Sebastian. It is pleasant to hear that the present owner of the beautiful demesne is likely to reside there more frequently than his predecessor. CHAPTER XIII. _THE GEOLOGY OF THE HEATH._ The appearance of the Upper Heath, as that portion of it beyond Jack Straw’s Castle to the north-west is called, shows that the purchase of it for the sake of its preservation was not a day too soon, while as far as preserving the primitive beauty of the Heath, it was years too late. The surface, originally flush with the paddock near the North End Hill, has been delved by sand and gravel diggers into a series of pits and hollows, with corresponding mounds and hillocks. At one period (1811), owing to the multiplicity of building operations going on, upwards of twenty loads a day passed through Hampstead, besides the quantity taken away by other roads.