At this time Belsize Lane was absolutely rural.[295] Great elms shaded its high grassy banks, with woodbine, wild-rose, and elder blowing in them. There you might still hear a ‘charm of birds’ on summer mornings, and gather blackberries in autumn. Between 1842-45 the estate fell into the builder’s hands, and the site of the famous mansion, which had had a name in local history from the time of the Crusades, became mapped out in formal lines, parallels, and parallelograms, which have since resulted in Belsize Avenue, Belsize Gardens, Belsize Square, Belsize Crescent, etc., and with a church in its own precincts. It may be that some of the fine old elms—part of the grand avenue that led from Haverstock Hill to the mansion; they were but few when I last saw it—may remain. If so, these and the name are all that are left to remind us of Belsize House, except the sketch of it in the doggerel verse of the satirist when the Welsh Ambassador was Master of the Revels: ‘This house, which is a nuisance to the land, Doth near a park and handsome garden stand, Fronting the road betwixt a range of trees, And is perfumed by the Hampstead breeze.’ [Illustration: _Belsize Lane, 1850._] There was, when I knew it, a little-used, gloomy, thorn-hedged footpath running out of Belsize Lane to Chalk Farm—now covered with houses, but then a very solitary place of ill repute after nightfall—which on the evening of February 21, 1845, became the scene of the murder of Mr. James Delarue by Thomas Henry Hocker, a young man only twenty-one years of age, who was convicted and executed. Jealousy was said to have provoked the crime, but the treachery, falsehood, and cruelty of the culprit appear to have hardened all hearts against him.[296] This is how Lucy Aiken writes of the unsavoury affair: ‘I rather congratulate myself on not being in Church Row during the delightful excitement of the murder’ (the murder of Delarue) ‘and the inquest, which appear to have had so many charms for the million. One comfort is, that the murdered man appears to have been anything but a loss to society. But I think the event will give me a kind of dislike to Belsize Lane, which I used to think the pleasantest, as well as the shortest, way from us to you.’[297] From this time Belsize and the beautiful lane became suspected; people looked shudderingly down the by-paths before entering them, and few cared to pass that way after nightfall. For some time part of the house remained, with windows boarded, the garden run to waste, the paths weed-grown, the lilied ponds filled up, the park a wilderness, the great trees lopped and broken, till the builder and his men set about their business in earnest, and evolved almost a suburban town on what had been a nobleman’s mansion and park for centuries. CHAPTER XXI. _THE HAMLET OF KILBURN._