Yet there are still a few vestiges of the old and the picturesque here. Bruce Grove, hard by, may be but a name, reminiscent of Robert Bruce and other Scottish monarchs who once owned a manor and a castle where suburban villas now cluster plentifully, and where the modern so-called "Bruce Castle" is a school; but there are dignified old red-brick mansions here still, lying back from the road behind strong walls and grand gates of wrought iron. The builder has his eye on them, an Evil Eye that has already blasted not a few, and with bulging money-bags he tempts the owners of the others: even as I write they go down before the pick and shovel. [Illustration: BALTHAZAR SANCHEZ' ALMSHOUSES, TOTTENHAM.] Old almshouses there are, too, with dedicatory tablet, complete. The builder and his money-bags cannot prevail here, you think. Can he not? My _good_ sirs, have you never heard of the Charity Commissioners, whose business it is to sit in their snug quarters in Whitehall and to propound "schemes" whereby such old buildings as these are torn down, their sites sold for a mess of pottage, and the old pensioners hustled off to some new settlement? "But look at the value of the land," you say: "to sell it would admit of the scope of the charity being doubled." No doubt; but what of the original testator's wishes? I think, if it were proposed to remove these old almshouses, the shade of Balthazar Sanchez, the founder, somewhere in the Beyond, would be grieved. One Bedwell, parson of Tottenham High Cross _circa_ 1631, and a most diligent Smelfungus, tells us Balthazar was "a Spanyard born, the first confectioner or comfit-maker, and the grand master of all that professe that trade in this kingdome"; and the tablet before-mentioned, on the front of the old almshouses themselves, tells us something on its own account, as thus-- "1600 Balthazar Sanchez, Borne in Spayne in the Cittie of Sherez in Estremadura, is the Fownder of these Eyght Almeshowses for the Releefe of Eyght poor men and women of the Towne of Tattenham High Crasse." Long may the queer old houses, with their monumental chimney-stalks and forecourt gardens remain: it were not well to vex the ghost of the good comfit-maker.