[Illustration: _South End Road, 1840._] In my time it crept, a sluggish stream, a mere ditch in dry weather, but after copious rain it rose suddenly, brimming to its margin, to disappear at the end of Angler’s Lane by a subterranean channel under part of Kentish Town, where it once more came to light as a narrow runlet in the main road that was easily stepped over. There were persons then living who remembered this portion of the river, a limpid stream flowing by the west side of Kentish Town towards King’s Cross, for it is not much more than half a century since it was arched over and built upon. The fields through which it passed showed signs of its meanderings, and were still lovely with trees that had figured in many an artist’s sketch-book, and had thence imparted the refreshment of their pictured beauty to many a home. The footpath through these meadows from Kentish Town followed the curve of an old rivulet scarcely dry in places, the whole course of which was traceable in the wavering line of aged willows, hollow and splintered, but putting forth hoar green branches above the exhausted stream that had once fed their roots. This was Mary Shelley’s lovely walk from Kentish Town through the fields, with their fine old elms and rivulets and alder-trees, and a view to the north of the wooded heights of Highgate. In her time Carlton Road and the region thereabouts were all meadows. This path led over the easiest of stiles through a little lane between hedges of hawthorn and elder by an old nursery garden and cottage where strawberries and cream were to be had in the season, and a cup of tea at all times, and so to South End or such portion of it as was not already changed to railway uses. The houses here were of a humbler description than those in the Flask Walk, but there were sufficient indications in little garden-borders, in roses trained about the doors, in vines wholly untrained, running to an excess of leafiness over walls and roofs, in a group of straw bee-hives, sheltered in a corner, to show how pretty and rustic the place had once been. There was the down-trodden, worn-out Green, with its white palings and rickety turnstile, in itself a protest to the farther use of it, and lime-trees, out of all proportion to the small houses you saw between them, large-limbed and flourishing. An ascending row of houses to the right, on what is now South Hill Park, occupied the levelled slopes the summits of which when I first knew the lovely neighbourhood afforded charming views, and not the least charming that of the eastern outskirts of Hampstead, sweeping up amidst a profusion of foliage towards the high ground about Squire’s Mount, with a foreground of water and groups of trees studding the undulating surface, the fields on the east bounded by the remarkable mound which now bears the name of Parliament Hill, but was then known by the more striking one of Traitors’ Hill.