Abraham Colfe, who founded these quaint old almshouses, was vicar of Lewisham about the middle of the seventeenth century. He died in 1657, and left property in trust for the purpose to the Leathersellers’ Company, who accordingly built them, as a tablet over the main entrance informs the passer-by, in 1664. [Illustration: LEWISHAM.] Another survival is the handsome old late seventeenth-century vicarage, already mentioned, standing a little out of its element, as it were, beside the high road. It was built in 1692-3 by Dr. Stanhope, the then vicar, and, as his surviving accounts tell us, it cost him £739 13_s._ to build. Dr. Stanhope, if we may accept the estimate of his character given by his monument in the church, was one of the best, for (_inter alia_) his “piety was real and rational, his charity great and universal.... His learning was elegant and comprehensive, his conversation polite and delicate, Grave without Preciseness, Facetious without Levity. The good Christian and solid Divine and the fine gentleman in him were happily united.” That, I think, is the _ne plus ultra_, the last word, in monumental eulogy. You cannot get better than the best, unless indeed you visit modern Lewisham and do your shopping at its popular “stores,” where a searching glance may discover “best fresh eggs” at one shilling and sixpence a dozen, and “superior” at two shillings. For the rest, a few strips of garden here and there border the high road through modern urban Lewisham, sometimes owning elms that in the old days were tall wayside trees. Here a giant workhouse, neighbouring the Colfe Almshouses, serves by its presence to underline and emphasise the social distance travelled—whether it be upwards or downwards let those decide who will—between the seventeenth century and the twentieth, and a few scattered weather-boarded cottages are left, showing what manner of buildings were those that fringed the road in days for ever gone. Midway between the date of those humble old dwellings and the modern shops is one old-fashioned shop where they sell hay, corn, straw, beans, and sweet-smelling seeds of all kinds. The name over the fascia is “Shove,” singularly inapplicable to this quiet, unassuming frontage.[1] To gaze upon its small-paned windows, to see and scent the hay and the fragrant contents of its bins of beans, peas, and varied seeds, must surely, with the coming of every spring, set the prisoned wage-earners of Lewisham longing keenly for the banished country whose breath comes fragrant from within. [Illustration: THE COLFE ALMSHOUSES.] [1] Alas! since writing the above, the shop is closed, and the house to be demolished. VI