Farmhouses are far to seek from Highgate Hill nowadays, new roads and streets of shops being more general. With the end of the eighteenth century, Highgate became a populous little town, but its outskirts did not altogether lose their terrors for travellers. Suburban villas had begun to sparsely dot these northern heights of London with the coming of the new era, but the New Police had not yet been brought into being; and so belated dwellers in these wilds afforded fine sport for the footpads, who, hunting in couples, and armed with horrible pitch-plasters, attacked the mild citizen from behind, and, clapping a plaster over his mouth, reduced him to an enforced silence, while they emptied his pockets at leisure. It was late one night in 1807 that Grimaldi, the most famous of all clowns, was robbed on Highgate Hill by two footpads. They spared him the usual plaster, perhaps because there was no one else about, and so it did not matter in the least how loudly he might shout for help. Among minor articles of spoil, they secured a remarkable watch which had been given him two years before as a testimonial by his many admirers. The dial represented his face in character when singing his popular comic song, “Me and my Neddy.” The robbers, seeing this, immediately recognised him. Looking at one another, they could not make up their minds to rob him of his treasure, and so they gave it back, Grimaldi goggling and grinning at them the while, as on the stage. So, with a vivid recollection of Sadler’s Wells, and bursting with laughter, they left him. It is peculiarly unfortunate for those who are uncertain about their aspirates that London and its neighbourhood should abound in place-names beginning with the letters “A” and “H.” Cockneys have ever—or ’ave hever, shall we say?—been afflicted with this difficulty; but they are overcoming the tendency of their forbears to speak of “’Ornsey, ’Ampstead, ’Igit, ’Arrow, ’Omerton, ’Ackney, ’Endon or ’Atfield.” The classic anecdote in this connection is that of the City Alderman who lived at Highgate, praising his locality to a distinguished guest at a Mayoral banquet. [Picture: Old Highgate Archway, demolished 1897] “Don’t you think ’Iget pretty?” he asked. “Really,” the guest is supposed to have replied, “I haven’t known you long enough to say.” “I’m not talking of meself,” returned the Alderman, “but of ’Iget on the ’Ill.”