In this rustic spot we have two churches, two inns, one general shop, a decreasing population, and a general post-office which will hold, all at once, if they are not very big people, and if they stand close together, quite six persons. Exactly what it is like, let this illustration show. It will be seen at once, and without any difficulty whatever, that it is a very humble relation indeed of the General Post-Office in St. Martin’s-le-Grand. There are some curious survivals at Petersham, the more curious because they survive at these late times in such comparatively close proximity to London. Adjoining the Fox and Duck Inn—one of the two aforesaid—is a little wooden building that looks like nothing else than an outhouse for gardening tools. It is really an old village lock-up for petty misdemeanants, such as may often be seen in remote rural places. Behind it is another old institution, equally disused, although it is not so very long since a strayed donkey was placed there. It is the village pound for lost and wandering cattle found upon the road and placed in the pound—impounded—until a claimant appears and pays a shilling to the beadle for release. The present condition of the pound is such that no animal placed in it could well be kept there, for the fence is decayed, and all attempts at maintaining the old institution appear to have been given up. A magnificent crop of nettles and thistles now grows within, and would make it an ideal place for any donkey that might chance to be impounded: donkeys being reputedly fonder of them than of any other kind of food. “Why does a donkey prefer thistles to corn or grass? Because he’s an ass.” Close by this quaint corner the two old curiously gabled Dutch-looking cottages pictured here are seen. The space between them is now merely a yard occupied by the Richmond Corporation for storing carts and road-making materials, but these were once the lodge-gates to the entrance of Petersham Park, in the old times when it was a private estate containing old Petersham Lodge, the mansion of my Lord Harrington, that peer to whom the poet Thomson, of “The Seasons,” alluded in his lines on the view from Richmond Hill: “There let the feasted eye unwearied stray; Luxurious, there, rove through the pendant woods That nodding hang o’er Harrington’s retreat.” The view in these pages shows a glimpse of those pendant woods, still flourishing up along the ridge of Richmond Park, but it is now the better part of a hundred years since the Commissioners of Woods and Forests purchased that peer’s old estate, demolished the mansion, and added the land as a very beautiful annexe to Richmond Park. The cottages, with their little gardens, are charming, and would be even more so were they red bricks of which they are built, instead of common yellow stock brick. [Illustration: PETERSHAM POST-OFFICE.]