A similar piece of good fortune helped the inhabitants to preserve the remains of the Old Avenue at North End from being enclosed in an adjacent demesne. The committee of the Hampstead Heath Protection Society, who now charge themselves with looking after the Heath and maintaining it intact for the people, are resolved on getting back as many of its original acres as possible. When, therefore in the summer of the year 1898 the beautiful estate of Golder’s Hill, the residence of the late Sir Spencer Wells, was to be sold, the inhabitants of Hampstead were naturally disturbed by the report that a syndicate of builders were plotting its purchase, with the intention of covering the charming grounds with streets of houses. Part of these grounds impinge upon the Heath, and it was said included the Flagstaff Hill, the very crowning point of view upon it, the threatened loss of which affected all the inhabitants, and roused, says my authority, a collective spirit of resistance. A letter from Mrs. Hart, widow of the artist, who had left a sum of money for such contingencies, appeared in some of the London papers, and called popular notice to the threatened vandalism. A committee was formed, and subscriptions were raised, to which the local and London County Councils, as well as many of the inhabitants of Hampstead, generously contributed, till the whole of the purchase-money, £40,500, was in a very short time happily provided. It is intended to let the house, but the picturesque grounds are to be kept in their integrity and added to the Heath, from which, the new ride now divides them. The cost of the ground purchased averages about £1,000 per acre. This was the price paid to Lord Mansfield for 209 acres of the Heath, while Sir Spencer Wilson received £100,000 for sixty-one acres, making together, with all extra expenses in the purchase of the Heath, £302,000. Everyone who knows the pleasant suburb must rejoice that a neighbourhood which has delighted the people of successive ages, as well as our own, is reserved to give enjoyment to those who shall come after us, and that henceforth, from generation to generation, each being, we may hope, more able to appreciate its natural beauty than the last, Hampstead will continue to be the scene of unnumbered holidays; the Heath, ‘Where sweet air stirs Blue harebells lightly, and where prickly furze Buds lavish gold,’[308] with its wide margin of hundreds of added acres, under the wise supervision of skilled conservators, growing year by year into fuller beauty of Nature-planted wild-flowers and indigenous furze and ferns.