We may, therefore, well look upon the Ravensbourne with interest, although it is true that a glance into it, over the bridge which here carries the busy London street across, sadly disappoints romantic anticipations. Deposits of mud, vestiges of pails past their prime, and outworn boots which the veriest tramp would scorn to own, line a discoloured stream, and grimy backyards abut upon it. To such a pass has civilisation brought the lower reaches of this once silvery watercourse, which is not so small but that it has tributaries of its own. Such an one is the river Quaggy, which embouches hereabouts into it. “Hereabouts,” I say, because only the local sewer authority could readily point out the exact spot; the Quaggy being, in fact, at the actual confluence, embedded in an underground pipe. But if you may not see the actual meeting of the streams, you may at least see the Quaggy on the other side of the road, a little distance before it joins forces with the Ravensbourne. There you shall perceive how only a little lesser indignity than a pipe has befallen it. Its little trickle still flows on in the eye of day, but it is made to flow in a formal concrete bed, here and there spanned by long stretches of pavement. A little higher up “Lee Bridge” crosses it, and there be those lesser Stanleys and Livingstones who have traced it to its source, even as those great explorers sought the beginnings of the Nile. A certain disappointment seems, however, to await those who seek the origin of the Quaggy, for those who have essayed, and accomplished, the feat describe how it rises on Shooter’s Hill “at the back of the Police-station”! Shooter’s Hill is well enough, but that last little piece of particularity destroys any lingering shred of romance. I should not be greatly surprised to find the Quaggy the object of police suspicion, for that name is merely an alias, its real ancient title being the Ket Brook, whence the district of Kidbrook derives its name. The “Quaggy” is a later title, conferred descriptively by those who observed the quags, or marshy places, through which it descended from Shooter’s Hill to these levels. Here, as already remarked, we are come to Lewisham. Many thousands of people remember Lewisham as still something of a village; and yet so quick-presto are the suburban changes around London that they now behold it not merely a thronged town, but much less distinguished even than that—just a limb of great, sprawling London, and thus stripped of most of its old-time individuality.