A piece of beautiful common-land through which the road runs at the extremity of the parish is still called “Bromley Common.” Down below it, in a hollow, is Lock’s Bottom, a hamlet whose pretty scenery is rather vainly endeavouring to bear up, under the infliction of some commonplace houses and a prominent police-station. There are picturesque alders in front of the “White Lion,” but the blue lamp of the police-station spoils the sentiment of it all. Why, you ask yourself, _that_ in a place by way of being so pretty and so rural? A few steps onward give the answer, in the great workhouse and the casual-ward, and the expectant tramps reclining, more pictorially than they know, by the pond under the tall fir-trees opposite. XI The road in the neighbourhood of Lock’s Bottom seems, in the old days, to have been particularly dangerous. It ran, in the middle of the seventeenth century and for long afterwards, through a wide district of unenclosed common-land, and was just one of those lonely highways where the footpads and highwaymen had matters very much their own way. An unpleasant adventure of this sort happened just here, beside a vanished landmark once known to wayfarers as the “Procession Oak,” to John Evelyn, the diarist, on May 23rd, 1652. Leaving his wife to take the waters at Tunbridge Wells, he set out on horseback for London. In his “Diary” we learn what befell him on the way: “The weather being hot, and having sent my man on before me, I rode negligently under favour of the shade till within three miles of Bromley. At a place call’d the Procession Oake, two cut-throates started out, and striking with long staves at the horse and taking hold of the reines, threw me downe, took my sword, and haled me into a deepe thickett some quarter of a mile from the highway, where they might securely rob me, as they soone did. What they got of money was not considerable, but they took two rings, the one an emerald with diamonds, the other an onyx, and a pair of bouckles set with rubies and diamonds, which were of value, and, after all, bound my hands behind me, and my feete, having before pull’d off my bootes; they then set me up against an oake, with most bloudy threats to cutt my throat if I offer’d to crie out or make any noise, for they should be within hearing, I not being the person they looked for. I told them, if they had not basely surpriz’d me, they should not have had so easy a prize, and that it would teach me never to ride neere an hedge, since had I been in the mid-way they durst not have adventur’d on me; at which they cock’d their pistols, and told me they had long guns too, and were fourteen companions. I begg’d for my onyx, and told them it being engraven with my armes would betray them, but nothing prevail’d. My horse’s bridle they slipt, and search’d the saddle, which they pull’d off, but let the horse graze, and then, turning againe, bridled him and tied him to a tree, yet so as he might graze, and thus left me bound.