The Frognal of to-day, though a charming neighbourhood, with its air of affluence, ease, and ordered neatness, has lost the more natural charms of fifty years ago. The old mystery of high walls is still with us, but the free wildness of grassy slopes and shady trees, with little neighbourly short-cuts crossing one another, or unpremeditated footpaths meandering about in aimless fashion, though to good purpose, are there no longer. I like not the wide road bisecting it, nor the lofty, many-windowed, scarlet-faced mansions overlooking it. For me they have destroyed too much of the tree-grouped greensward of my early days, and park-like look of the old Frognal precinct, and the pretty, tree-shaded, devious ways that led to unexpected places. I remember wandering by one of these narrow footways with a few trees hanging over one side of it, when suddenly I found myself in front of a dilapidated lodge and other offices appertaining to the sham Tudor mansion known as Frognal Priory.[98] At that time—1869—it was a tottering ruin, supported by beams of timber on one side to make it tenantable; and, as I soon found, giving off, through neglected drainage, _mal odours_ enough to defy all but the curiosity of a press interviewer, or of the London Sunday visitors, whose purses helped to support the ancient, self-constituted custodian. Half a century earlier this house, with its simulated Elizabethan appearance, must have been a really pictorial object. The irregularly gabled front of ruddy bricks, its oriel and mullioned windows, carved window-frames, quaint waterspouts, and twisted chimneys, even in this stage of ruin and combined with squalor, was eminently picturesque, and, from an artist’s point of view, really effective. On this account, and for the sake of some lovely views to be seen from the upper windows at the back, a few youthful enthusiasts of the profession, devoted to form and colour, would lodge here for days together, despite the unsafe walls, morbific air, and fearful effluvia from the ground-floor premises. The history of this modern antique house—the building of which many people living at Hampstead in the fifties could remember—is too curious to be left out of our account of Frognal. It was built by one Thompson,[99] better known to his friends as ‘Memory Corner Thompson.’ Originally a public-house broker and salesman, he is said to have gained this distinctive appellation from a marvellous feat of memory—nothing less than stating for a bet the name and occupation of everyone who kept a corner shop in the city of London. But as pawnbrokers, chemists, and publicans generally monopolize these usually Janus-faced houses, the difficulty may have been more apparent than real to one whose business with the latter made him naturally notice the shops emphasized by exemption from his professional occupation. At any rate, he won the bet, and became known by this prefix ever after.