It was a delight to trace the descendants of the plants old Gerard found upon the Heath, still lingering in their ancient habitats, all but the primrose, the odorous violet, and the lily of the valley, which, before the fashion of the Wells had waned, retired from the Heath to Turner’s Wood, and was wholly lost sight of by outsiders when Lord Mansfield enclosed it in Caen Wood. In those far-away times gipsies, with glittering eyes, bangled arms, and bright orange or red kerchiefs snooding their blue-black hair, were not the only picturesque figures to be met with on the Heath. It was no unusual thing to meet with speculative lace-makers from Buckinghamshire, in their short red cloaks, frilled with black lace, and wonderful black bonnets, with cushion and pendent vari-coloured bobbins swinging from it, selling their thread lace to chance customers, and taking orders from others who had learned the value of their wares. But, after all, their appearance was an accident, while the gipsies’ was of common occurrence. You passed a furze clump or a sheltered hollow, and saw no one, but an instant later a nut-brown palmist stood in your path, with speculation in her eyes, and promises of love and fortune on her lips. We have changed all this. The brown hand goes uncrossed with silver, and faith in palmistry is reserved for drawing-room professors of it. CHAPTER XX. _THE SUB-MANOR OF BELSIZE._ The sub-manor of Belsize, lying on the south side of the parish of Hampstead, was given to the Abbot and Convent of Westminster by Sir Roger le Brabazon in 1317, upon condition that they should provide a priest to say a daily Mass in their church for the souls of Edmund, Earl of Lancaster, Blanch, his wife, the said Sir Roger, and all the faithful departed this life. Whether, at the dissolution of the abbey, it passed through the hands of the Bishop of Westminster is not known. At present it is the property of the Dean and Chapter of that minster. The manor-house was for a long period the residence of the Waad (subsequently Wood) family, who held the lease during many years of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, under the said Dean and Chapter. Armigall Waad was Clerk of the Council to Henry VIII. and Edward VI. He was also a nautical adventurer of some notoriety, and Anthony Wood asserts the first Englishman who discovered America. This idea, for it amounts to nothing more, is derived from the inscription formerly on an old monument in Hampstead Church—apart from which, it is said, there is not a shred of evidence of a discovery to which, as everybody knows, he had no claim. It is not even clear that he was amongst the first Englishmen who visited that country. Fuller says that his voyages are fully described by Hakluyt; but Park says that readers may search there or elsewhere in vain for Waad’s voyages, although in Hore’s account of his voyage to Newfoundland, in 1536, Waad is mentioned as an adventurer in that undertaking.