Lodgings were to be had in the High Street, where little else was to be had, the few shops in it, with their half-hatch doors, open shop-boards, and hanging shutters, showing only the most simple necessaries of village life—always excepting the so-called general shop, with its heterogeneous stock of dry-goods, drapery, and drugs. Every household in those days baked its own bread, and an itinerant butcher visited the village weekly.[255] But the farms and cottages around supplied the freshest butter, eggs, milk, cream and poultry, with the common kinds of vegetables and fruit; for the rest, there was the London carrier, who led his horse by easy stages up the hill, bringing provisions, as requisitioned from day to day, for the visitors. At the opening of the season, the farmhouse productions rose to famine price; the laundresses who lived in a congeries of cottages, at the bottom of the Vale of Health, with their backs to the east wind and the pool—for the pond as we see it now was not made till 1777, previous to which date it was a mere pool fed by a spring that trickled from the bank that margined it—immediately raised their prices. The parson bethought him of charity sermons, and the doctors of increased fees; and thus the whole social system of the village found itself comforted, and enriched, by a restored faith in the medicinal springs. In fact, to again quote Baker, ‘everything became as dear as a freeholder’s vote, and as great an imposition as a Dutch reckoning.’ But the Hampstead of these later days was an altered place from what it had been when Baker’s comedy was written. It had been made to see the error of its ways, and as the greatest sinners are said to become the greatest saints, so the peccant village appears to have recoiled to the opposite degree from its former self, even to the verge of decorous (some said dismal) dulness, and had fallen into neglect, as Dr. Soames very oddly phrases it, ‘through the knavery of some, the folly of others, and the exceeding great zeal for the glory of God and the good of the poor.’ The raffling-shops shut up, Mother Huff’s no longer heard of, the tea-gardens deserted for the most part by all but the common people, ‘who on Sundays, always mindful of the commandment which enjoins them to do no work on that day, took occasion to eat buns at Chelsea, drink beer at St. Pancras, of being sworn on the Horns at Highgate,[256] and of drinking tea at Hampstead or _Little_ Hornsey,’[257] which was in the centre of the present Finsbury Park. New Georgia was as yet unheard of, but, if I remember aright, the bowling-green had not disappeared. The tavern is doing a brisk business; the Long Room is full of fine company, and the walks between the elms and limes in blossom, bright with colour, and gay with mirth, which, more robust than in these artificial times, laughed out merrily and was not ashamed.