‘Many of my friends may remember this young lady[152] at the entrance of the village; her fate was distressing, for it is scarcely too much to say that she died of a broken heart. I made this drawing when she was in full health and beauty. On passing some time after I saw, to my grief, that a wretched board had been nailed to her side, on which was written in large letters, “All vagrants and beggars will be dealt with according to law.” The tree seemed to have felt the disgrace, for even then some of the top branches had withered. Two long spikes had been driven far into her side; in another year one half had become paralyzed, and not long after the other shared the same face.’ [Illustration: _Holly-bush Hill, 1840._] On the occasion of Constable’s second lecture at the same place we catch a glimpse of Leslie walking across the West End fields to hear it. It was a summer’s evening, and Leslie pauses now and again to watch the splendid combinations of the glorious clouds, and their radiant effect in and upon the landscape—effects which Constable had noticed also, and called attention to in his lecture. All the then scientific, intellectual, and social life of Hampstead had its headquarters at the Assembly Room on Holly-bush Hill till after the fifties. Here, as I have said, the public balls and concerts, lectures and conversaziones, took place, and all the social problems and local movements that affected the well-being of the town and its inhabitants were discussed here. Here, too, were held those memorable meetings which had for their object the frustration of the scheme so subtly and surreptitiously devised, to wrest the Heath and its privileges from the copyholders and the general public; and here were resolved on various occasions those prandial and pyrotechnic displays of loyalty that from time to time have borne witness to the strength of this sentiment amongst the inhabitants of Hampstead. Nor is the Holly-bush Tavern, of which the Assembly Room was in 1855 an integral part, without its own interesting associations. It does not look much like a scene of political intrigue, yet on this account, possibly, it was the rendezvous of Carr (Earl of Rochester), Dering and Goring, who during the wars of the King and Parliament met at this house to devise the rising in Kent, Essex, and Hertfordshire. The cosy parlour saw other company in Charles II.’s time, when the wicked ‘dramatists of the Restoration’ were wont ‘to set the table in a roar’ with wit, the sparkle of which, like the phosphorescent glitter of corruption, has vanished at the presence of the healthy light.