At the time these lines are being written Mason’s Hill still remains old-fashioned. A few of its dignified Queen Anne mansions, standing with an old-world detachment behind their palisade of formal iron railings, are left; but they are to be sold for clearance and rebuilding, and so also are a group of ancient dormer-windowed sixteenth- and seventeenth-century houses of a humbler type. They have all the added importance that comes from being situated above a footpath which itself is in places raised more than head and shoulders above the road for wheeled traffic. Old wooden railings protect children, boozy wayfarers, and sheer wool-gathering, star-gazing folk from falling off the pavement into the hollow road. [Illustration: THE ROAD ACROSS BROMLEY COMMON.] Having wriggled its way through Bromley and climbed Mason’s Hill, the Hastings Road sets out across Bromley Common, broad and straight and forceful, in a splendid forthright manner, about its ultimate business of getting to the coast. Most other roads show plentiful evidences of having, like Topsy, grown; but this, you can see at a glance, was obviously made. It occupies a ridge. Villas front upon it on leaving the town behind: villas of every type since such things began to be, and a leisurely walk past them is therefore something in the nature of a generous education in the varying ideals in domestic architecture since the days of the Regency. But presently these are all left behind, and the fields on either side of this modern road with an ancient Roman inflexibility are broken only by the house and grounds of that most beautiful and noble early eighteenth-century mansion, the Rookery, built of the most exquisite red brick. The Rookery belongs to a time before this fine road came into being: to that time when travellers came painfully up the hill to that open common much dwelt upon by old county historians. Opposite the mansion in those days stood the two polled elms known from time immemorial as Great and Little Beggars’ Bush, and known most unfavourably, for in the shade cast by them at night not merely beggars, but those highwaymen of the meaner sort called footpads, lurked. Time has a sardonic trick of turning the matter-of-fact descriptions of the old topographers into absurdly misleading statements. Thus, reading Lysons’ description of Bromley, written in 1796, we smile at his remarks that “the Anglo-Saxon _Brom-leag_ signifies a field, or heath, where broom grows,” and that “the great quantity of that plant on all the waste places near the town fully justifies this etymology.” Bromley Common was in great part enclosed soon after the middle of the eighteenth century, and most of the remaining two hundred and fifty acres were cut up and partitioned in 1822, amid much local satisfaction. With it went the broom near the town; although, to be sure, it is still plentifully to be found on the further commons towards Keston.