Flamstead, let it be noted, having originally been Verlamstead, owes its name directly to the river whose valley it overlooks from its hill-top. Its church-tower and characteristic Hertfordshire dwarf extinguisher spire may be glimpsed from the road, crowning a wooded ridge. The succeeding mile on to Markyate Street—the “River Hill improvement,” as it was called—was one of the last pieces of work undertaken in the long series of Holyhead Road alterations, and was cut after 1830. The old road, still visible on the right, goes for the length of a mile as a steep and narrow lane, almost parallel with the improved highway, and falls into it at the beginning of the village of Markyate, as it is shortly named nowadays. The “street” has only of late years been officially dropped by the General Post Office, in response to the request of the inhabitants, to whom, and to strangers having business here, the old address caused considerable trouble and misunderstanding; those not familiar with the place not unnaturally thinking “Markyate Street, Dunstable,” to be a thoroughfare in that town, instead of, as a matter of fact, 4½ miles distant. Markyate is indeed merely a street of houses fringing either side of the road, and what the old coachmen called a “thoroughfare village”; a long street certainly, but nothing else, and realising the Euclidian definition of a line, “length without breadth.” It is an old-world place, drowsily conducting from Hertfordshire into Beds, with too many inns for its present needs, and one—the original “Sun” of coaching days—converted into a laundry and looking with severity upon the house directly opposite, that has assumed its old style and title. Beyond Markyate, where the land shelves steeply down from the road on the right hand, is the lovely park of Markyate Cell, with a fine old Elizabethan manor-house, turreted, terraced, and with noble clusters of carved brick chimneys, once the site of a nunnery; and in a hollow—the roof of its absurd little Georgian red-brick tower below the road level—the toy-like church of this beautiful domain. The rest of the way to Dunstable is lonely, Kensworth village hidden somewhere in the folds of the hills, and its Post Office only visible. At one mile from Dunstable remains an old toll-house, the first now met with on the journey from London. It was on this stretch of road, between St. Albans and Hockliffe, that the gay and mercurial highwayman, “Gentleman Harry,” did his last stroke of business, in the spring of 1747. Harry Simms had been highwayman, rover, soldier, sailor on board a man o’ war, and, deserting and setting foot ashore at Bristol, became highwayman again. Having, as himself might have said, thus boxed the compass, his career was fully rounded off, and the only things necessary to complete it were a rope and a hangman. They were nearer than he thought, poor butterfly!