Then Haverstock Hill, with the Load of Hay tavern, looking in 1845 as rustic and simple as its name. It had been famous for its tea-gardens, and an ancient footpath from the Lower Heath, Hampstead, formerly crossed the fields from Pond Street, and came out beside it on the main road. Above the bank, rising from the highway on the left, stood the cottage, ‘famous,’ as Carey in his ‘Book of the Roads’ (1812) called it, as the residence of Sir Richard Steele, the ‘solitude’ that for so many years reminded readers of the literary Captain’s delightful essays, and recalled in his company all the wits of Queen Anne’s time, who, on their way to the summer meetings of the Kit-Cat Club at the Upper Flask, Hampstead, were wont to beguile him from unfinished copy, an easy task, since the gay instincts of the man on these occasions would generally override the severity of the philosopher, and prevent the personal application of the moralities he so charmingly discoursed about. [Illustration: _Hampstead from Primrose Hill._] ‘I am in a solitude,’ he wrote to Pope, June 1, 1712, ‘an house between Hampstead and London, in which Sir Charles Sedley died, breathing his last,’ he adds, ‘in this very room,’ a circumstance that, in connection with his enforced rusticity, and the circumstances that induced it, combined to waken serious reflections; and writing on this occasion, as Pope himself was said to write, ‘_with his reputation in his hand_,’ Sir Richard somewhat ungenerously, when we consider the close kinship of many of Sedley’s inclinations with his own, improved the occasion at the dead man’s expense, wholly ignoring the assurance of gossiping Anthony à Wood that poor Sedley, after suffering much for his offences, took up and grew serious, and subsequently became a leading man in the House of Commons. If this be true, it says a good deal for the recuperative moral force concentrated in Sir Charles’s nature. Steele’s cottage stood so nearly opposite to the little hostel, the Load of Hay, that its inhabitants, if so minded, could have almost distinguished the features of the gentlemen of the road who, towards sunset, occasionally drew bridle beside the horse-block in front of the well-worn steps leading into it, to refresh themselves with a tankard of ripe ale, or some more potent stirrup-cup, before starting across country to Brown’s Well, or Finchley Common, places which continued till quite modern times to be words of fear in the vocabulary of travellers.