This desolate tract is bounded by the settlement of Ponder's End, an old roadside hamlet. "Ponder's End," says Lamb, "emblematic name, how beautiful!" Sarcasm that, doubtless, for of what it is emblematic, and where lies the beauty of either place or name, who shall discover? The name has a heavily ruminative or contemplative sound, a little out of key with its modern note. For even Ponder's End has been rudely stirred up by the pitchfork of progress and bidden go forward, and new terraces of houses and shops--no, not _shops_, nothing so vulgar; "business premises" if you please--have sprung up, and the oldest inhabitant is distraught with the changes that have befallen. Where he plodded in the mud there are pavements; the ditch into whose unsavoury depths he has fallen many a time when returning late from the old Two Brewers is filled up, and the Two Brewers itself has changed from a roadside tavern to something resplendent in plate-glass and brilliant fittings. Our typical ancient and his friends, the market-gardening folk and the loutish waggoners, are afraid to enter. Nay, even the name of the village or hamlet, or urban district, or whatever the exact slang term of the Local Government Board for its modern status may be, is not unlikely to see a change, for to the newer inhabitants it sounds derogatory to be a Ponder's Ender. To this succeeds another strip of sparsely-settled land, and you think that here, at last, the country is gained. Vain thought! Enfield Highway, a populous mile-length, dispels all such ideas, and even Enfield Wash, where the travellers of old were content to be drenched in the frequent floods, so long as they actually escaped with their lives, is suburban and commonplace. The stretch of road between the Wash and Waltham Cross still goes by the shivery name of Freezywater. Enfield Highway, like Ponder's End, was until quite recently stodged in sloughs, and resolutely old-world; almost as old world indeed as when, in 1755, Mr. Spencer, the Lord Spencer of a few years later, came up from the shires in great state with his bride. Their procession consisted of three chariots, each drawn by six horses and escorted by two hundred horsemen. At sight of this cavalcade the whole neighbourhood was up in arms. The timid fled, the Jacobites rejoiced and ran off to ring the church bells in a merry peal, while loyal folks and brave armed themselves with pitchforks, pokers, and spades; for all thought the Pretender had come again and was marching on London.