Shooter's Hill was not always a place whereon one could rest in safety. Indeed, it bore for long years a particularly bad name as being the lurking-place of ferocious footpads, cutpurses, highwaymen, cut-throats, and gentry of allied professions who rushed out from these leafy coverts and took liberal toll from wayfarers. Six men were hanged hereabouts, in times not so very remote, for robbery with murder upon the highway; the remains of four of them decorated the summit of the hill, while two others swung gracefully from gibbets beside the Eltham Road. The "Bull" inn, standing at the top of the hill, was in coaching days the first post-house at which travellers stopped and changed horses on their way from London to Dover. The "Bull" has been rebuilt in recent years, but tradition says (and tradition is not always such a liar as some folks would have us believe) that Dick Turpin frequented the road, and that it was at this old house he held the landlady over the fire in order to make her confess where she had hoarded her money. The incident borrows a certain picturesqueness from lapse of time, but, on the whole, it is not to be regretted that the days of barbecued landladies are past. Our old friend Pepys has something to say of what he did or what was done to him on Shooter's Hill, under date of April 11, 1661; but it was, at any rate, not a happening of any great note, and moreover, Mr. Pepys' prattle sometimes becomes tiresome, and so we will pass him by for once in a way. His fellow diarist, Evelyn, was here in 1699, for he writes, under August, "I drank the Shooter's Hill waters." A very much more important person, Queen Anne, to wit (who, alas! is dead), is also said to have partaken of the mineral spring which made Shooter's Hill a minor spa long years ago. The spring is still here, and it is this which makes the summit of Shooter's Hill so graciously green and refreshing. People no longer come to drink the waters, but he who thirsts by the wayside and sports the blue ribbon, may, an he please, instead of calling at the "Bull," or the "Red Lion," across the road, quench his thirst at a drinking-fountain, which is something between a lich-gate and a Swiss chalet, erected here in recent years. [Sidenote: HIGHWAYMEN]