Twelve months later, when the Great Fire swept out as with the besom of destruction the germs of the plague, many of the fugitives from London watched from the Heath the destruction of their homes and property, the smoke of the city ascending ‘like the smoke of a great furnace,’ a smoke so dense and fearful that it ‘darkened the sun at noonday, and if at any time the sun peeped through, it looked as red as blood; through the long night there was no darkness of night;’ and, to add to these horrors, on the dreadful Wednesday night ‘the people of London, now of the fields,’ heard the murmur that the French were coming, and though, in the quaint language of the writer of the ‘City Remembrancer,’ ‘the women, naked and weak, did quake and tremble, many of the citizens began to stir themselves like lions or bears bereaved of their whelps, and “Arm! arm!” resounded through the woods and suburbs.’ These scenes, of which Hampstead Heath has been the centre, have long since faded out of the traditions of its inhabitants, like those of that still older night in 1588, when the cresset upon Beacon Hill blazed the approach of the Armada to its fellow on Hadley Church tower, and thence from cresset to cresset to the farthest North—scenes full of the tragic passions of human perplexity and terror. The General Elections for Middlesex appear to have always taken place on Hampstead Heath. I read that at one of these meetings of the Middlesex freemen on the top of Hampstead Hill,[31] 1695, Admiral Lord Edward Russell made his appearance before the assembled voters, and was returned without opposition. These meetings occasioned the assembling of great mobs of rough persons and much lawlessness, which greatly facilitated the business of cut-purses and footpads who habitually haunted the Heath. But at the commencement of 1700, after much trouble on the part of the influential inhabitants, this nuisance was done away with, only, as it would appear, to make space for another—for some time previous to 1732 horse-races took place upon the upper Heath, and were largely attended.[32] The race-course appears to have been at the back of Jack Straw’s Castle, where the surface of the Heath, so delved and broken up and caverned by the sand and gravel diggers in modern times, was then, it is said, level with North End Hill. In July, 1736, a paragraph in the _Grub Street Journal_ states that while the horses were being run on the Hampstead course, a gentleman, about sixty years of age, was observed hanging almost double over a gate, his head nearly touching the ground. His horse was grazing near him, and there had been no foul play; his watch and money were upon him. The dead man was a Mr. Hill, a teller in the Excise Office.