think few ever realise the scale of these villas and their grounds until the houses themselves are pulled down and the grounds laid out as building plots for what we now understand by "villas"--a fate that has lately befallen a few. When it is realised that the site lately occupied by one of these staid mansions and its surrounding gardens will presently harbour thirty or forty little modern houses--why, then an unwonted respect is felt for it and its kind. [Sidenote: BRIXTON HILL] Brixton Hill brings one up out of the valley of the Thames. The hideous church of Brixton stands on the crest of it, with the hulking monument of the Budd family, all scarabei and classic emblems of death, prominent at the angle of the roads--a _memento mori_, ever since the twenties, for travellers down the road. Among the mouldering tombstones, whose neglect proves that grief, as well as joy and everything else human, passes, is one in shape like a biscuit-box, to John Miles Hine, who died, aged seventeen, in 1824. A verse, plainly to be read by the wayfarer along the pavements of Brixton Hill, accompanies name and date: O Miles! the modest, learned and sincere Will sigh for thee, whose ashes slumber here; The youthful bard will pluck a floweret pale From this sad turf whene'er he reads the tale, That one so young and lovely--died--and last, When the sun's vigour warms, or tempests rave, Shall come in summer's bloom and winter's blast, A Mother, to weep o'er this hopeless grave. An inscription on another side shows us that her weeping was ended in 1837, when she died, aged fifty-two; and now there is no turf and no flowerets, and the tomb is neglected, and the cats make their midnight assignations on it when the electric trams have gone to bed and Brixton snores. On the right hand side, at the summit of Brixton Hill, there still remains an old windmill. It is in Cornwall Road. True, the sails of its tall black tower are gone, and the wind-power that drove the machinery is now replaced by a gas-engine; but in the old building corn is yet ground, as it has been since in 1816 John Ashby, the Quaker grandfather of the present millers, Messrs. Joshua & Bernard Ashby, built that tower. Here, unexpectedly, amid typical modern suburban developments, you enter an old-world yard, with barns, stables and cottage, pretty much the same as they were over a hundred years ago, when the mill first arose on this hill-top, and London seemed far away.