Very different was the aspect of these first miles out of London in the days of Izaak Walton, Cowper, and Lamb. Cowper's Johnny Gilpin rode to Edmonton and Ware, and Walton and Lamb--the inspired Fleet Street draper and the thrall of the Leadenhall Street office--are literary co-parceners in the valley of the Lea. "You are well overtaken, gentlemen," says Piscator, in the _Compleat Angler_, journeying from London; "a good morning to you both. I have stretched my legs up Tottenham Hill to overtake you, hoping your business may occasion you towards Ware, whither I am going this fine, fresh May morning." He meant that suburban eminence known as Stamford Hill, where, in the beginning of May 1603, the Lord Mayor and Sheriffs of London, having ridden out in State for the purpose, met James the First travelling to London to assume the Crown of England. Stamford Hill still shadows forth a well-established prosperity. It was the favoured suburban resort of City merchants in the first half of the nineteenth century, and is still intensely respectable and well-to-do, even though the merchants have risen with the swelling of their bankers' pass-books to higher ambitions, and though many of their solid, stolid, and prim mansions know them no more, and are converted not infrequently into what we may bluntly call "boys' and girls' schools," termed, however, by their respective Dr. Blimber's and Miss Pinkerton's "scholastic establishments for young ladies and young gentlemen." The old-time City merchant who resided at Stamford Hill when the nineteenth century was young (a period when people began to "reside" in "desirable residences" instead of merely living in houses), used generally, if he were an active man, to go up to his business in the City on horseback, and return in the same way. If not so active, he came and went by the "short stage," a conveyance between London and the adjacent towns, to all intents and purposes an ordinary stage-coach, except that it was a two-horsed, instead of a four-horsed, affair. The last City man who rode to London on horseback has probably long since been gathered to his fathers, for the practice naturally was discontinued when railways came and revolutionised manners and customs.