It stands too well within the suburban radius of London for it to escape modern influences, and although, as Dickens said, in _Oliver Twist_, every other house was a tavern, inns are fewer nowadays and shops more numerous; and many of the surviving inns have been rebuilt. The original “Green Man,” a very much larger and altogether more important house than the existing one, is no more. Sir Robert Peel—the great Sir Robert, statesman and originator of “Peelers”—often stayed there from Saturday to Monday, and it was beneath its roof that Lord Palmerston received the news of his succession to the title. The “Mitre,” one of the most important of Barnet’s inns at the close of the seventeenth century, has wholly disappeared, and the little house of that name, at the London end of the town, does but stand on a very small portion of its site; the rest of the ground being occupied by a large and exceedingly hideous building belonging to a firm of grocers. The disappearance of the “Mitre” is the more to be regretted, because it was a house of historic importance, General Monk, on his march up to London in 1660, having rested there, while his army encamped about the town. The country was tired of the Commonwealth, and Monk at the head of 14,000 men, was master of the situation. No one knew his intentions. Appointed by Parliament, and yet with a commission from the King in his pocket, his advance from the north was the cause of the liveliest hopes and apprehensions to both sides. Accompanying him were two “Councellors of State and Abjurers of the King’s Family,” a worthy pair named Scot and Robinson, who were really acting as the spies of the Parliament. Staying with him at the “Mitre,” they secured a room adjoining his, and either found or made a hole in the wainscot, to see and hear anything that might pass. The imagination readily pictures them peeping through the chinks and the secretive Monk, probably well aware of their doings, smiling as he undressed and went to bed. How he marched to London and thence, declaring for Charles II., to Dover, belongs to other than local history. The “Red Lion” remains the most prominent house. What has rightly been called a “ghastly story” is that told of it in coaching days. An officer and his daughter, on their way to London to attend a funeral, only succeeded after a great deal of trouble in obtaining accommodation here. On retiring to her room, the young lady chanced to turn the handle of a cupboard, when to her horror the door burst open and a corpse toppled out, almost felling her to the floor. The “accommodation” had been made by hastily removing the body from the bed and placing it where it would not have been found, except for that feminine mingled curiosity and precautionary sense which impels our womenkind to peer agitatedly under every bed, to leave no cupboard unexplored, and no drawer not scrutinised.