[Illustration: STRAND-ON-THE-GREEN: VIEW UP-RIVER.] Strand-on-the-Green is a hamlet of Chiswick, long a delightful retreat of the Dukes of Devonshire, whose stately mansion of Chiswick House in its surrounding park dignified the old village. But when a suburban population grew up around the neighbourhood of that lordly dwelling-house the owners left it. There is an antipathy between dukes and democracy comparable only to oil and water. Even the neighbourhood of a highly-respectable (and highly-rented) suburb renders the air enervating to ducal lungs, even though the ducal purse be inordinately enriched by the ground-rents of it. It seems that when a man becomes a duke the sight of other men’s chimney-pots grows unendurable; unless indeed they be the chimney-pots of another duke; and so he is fain to seclude himself in the middle of his biggest park, in the most solitary part of the country he can find. The higher his rank in the peerage, the more cubic feet of air he requires. What I should like to see—but what no one ever will see—would be a duke graciously continuing to reside in the midst of the suburb that has grown up around him, and to which he owes a good part of his living, and being quite nice to his neighbours. Not only patronising and charitable to the poor, but just as human and accessible as middle-class snobbery would allow him to be. It cannot be said that the local developments have been at all swift, or more than very moderately successful. For example, as you proceed from Strand-on-the-Green to Chiswick, you come first of all to Grove Park, where there is a railway station of that name which, together with an ornate public-house and a few shops and houses, wears a look as though left in the long ago to be called for, and apparently not wanted. I have known Grove Park for forty years, and it is just the same now as then. “The last place made” was the description of it long ago given me by a railway official there, pleased to see a human being; and although many places have come into existence since then, it still wears that ultimate look. In the long ago, when I went to school in the Chiswick high road at Turnham Green, at a boarding-school that occupied an old mansion called “Belmont House,” we fronted almost directly opposite Duke’s Avenue, which still remained at that date just an avenue of trees, with never a house along the whole length of it, until you came to the noble wrought-iron gates leading into the awful ducal sanctities themselves. One might freely roam along the delightful avenue, but the great iron gates were, it seemed, always jealously shut; and even had they not been, one’s vague ideas of a something terrible in unknown ducal shape would have prevented trespass. I have seen not a few dukes since then, and haven’t been in the least frightened, strange to say.