It appears singular why, having possessed himself of the poison, and knowing its almost instantaneous effect, he should have left his home, and gone out into the wild, dark night and distant solitude of Hampstead Heath, to perpetrate the despairing sin of self-murder. Perhaps the wretched man was goaded by the scorpion-stings of conscience to affinities closer to the condition of his mind than the conventional and ill-gotten luxuries around him. The cold damp earth, the sharp furze spines, the buffeting winds, the all-aloneness—save for the ghosts of lost opportunities, of great talents turned to infernal uses, of high respect and honours thrown away—seemed more in sympathy with the fierce frenzy, the unutterable horror, of his unmasked soul. Assuredly, no more terrible proof could be required that ‘sooner or later sin is its own avenger,’ than the suicide of John Sadleir. CHAPTER II. _THE WAYS TO HAMPSTEAD._ The oldest maps of London extant show two roads to Hampstead; Aggas’s (time of Elizabeth) has four. The most easterly of these roads ran out by Gray’s Inn Lane, past old St. Pancras and Battle Bridge, through Kentish Town and part of Holloway to Highgate, touching Caen Wood, and so by Bishop’s Wood and Wild Wood Corner to Hampstead. Later on a branch of this same Gray’s Inn or Battle Bridge Road ran off by St. Pancras a little to the west, into a country lane running up from Tottenham Court Road, into what is now the Hampstead Road, and so to Hampstead.[37] Another road ran out by Tyburn, crossing the road to Reading—the present Edgware Road—and going on by Lisson Grove to Kilburn Abbey, passing West End and Sutcup Hill, Hampstead, and thence on to Edgworth. But the most interesting of these roads, and which is distinctly traced in Aggas’s map, ran up from Charing Cross, through St. Martin’s Lane to Broad St. Giles’s, crossing the ‘Waye to Uxbridge’ (Oxford Street), and thence up Tottenham Court Road, which shows how nearly the modern highway follows the lines of the ancient one. It looks very like the present road to Hampstead, except that it appears to stop short at the top of Tottenham Court Road. The difference is in the road itself and its surroundings—running as it did over a track, which, once made, was left to take care of itself; dangerous with heaps of refuse and hollow places that in winter were full of water, and at other times absolute sloughs. Even in Charles II.’s time, when turnpike roads were made by Act of Parliament, the travelling by coach or waggon does not appear to have been much improved. The highways were in places so narrow that a lady traveller in 1764 tells us that, meeting another coach, her conveyance was brought to a standstill till the road was made sufficiently wide at that particular part to allow of the carriages passing each other. In winter and in rainy seasons, owing to the want of a proper knowledge of draining, it was not an unknown grievance for the waters in low-lying