A few years later he began to see that it was not in a suburb of Birmingham that even he could make a Paradise. He saw that to carry out his plans the day must come when he should move to the neighbourhood of London. There was still much, he felt, to be done before he should be ready to take this step. But from a clear sky there came a clap of thunder. He was suddenly filled with alarm lest his plans should be forestalled. He was startled to learn that Bentham had one day said to Matthew Hill, “I have been thinking whether, if a sucker were taken from your Hazelwood tree and planted near London, it would grow.” In February, 1825, Matthew wrote that Brougham had just told him that he, John Smith,[65] and James Mill had resolved to found a school at London on the Hazelwood plan immediately. “Brougham has some money in hand, and J. Smith has offered to find the rest at four per cent. Brougham says that Burdett, Hobhouse, and Mill are strongly in favour of Hazelwood.”[66] Rowland Hill was not a little alarmed at the news, and with some reason, too. “Will it not be well,” he wrote back to his brother, “to inform Brougham that we have it in contemplation to establish a metropolitan school ourselves? If he knows this already, I think his conduct is very strange.” The brothers were not long in coming to a decision. They resolved to act upon Bentham’s thought with all speed, and plant near London a sucker from the Hazelwood tree. [Illustration: BRUCE CASTLE, TOTTENHAM.] As soon as Rowland had somewhat recovered his strength, he began to explore the country round London, in the quest after a suitable house. The search was a long one. “I have,” he wrote in March, 1826, “with the exception of a small district which I am just going to explore, and a part of Essex, examined every great road from London.” At length his efforts were crowned with success. In the old mansion which had for ages borne the name of Bruce Castle, standing in the beautiful fragment of what once had been a wide park, he found a home for his new school. He had always been keenly alive to the charms both of scenery and antiquity. Here he found the two happily combined. The park, indeed, was but small, yet so thick was the foliage of the stately trees, and so luxuriant the undergrowth of the shrubberies, that its boundaries failed to catch the eye. High overhead the rooks, from time immemorial, had had their homes in the lofty elms. The wood-pigeons built on the topmost branches of a noble cedar of Lebanon, and the cuckoo, with his two-fold shout, never forgot there the return of spring. The kingfisher has been seen perching on a branch that overhung the pool in which the water-hen has reared her young. Hard by the main building stood an ancient tower, where the owls, year after year, made their nest—a tower which was standing when Elizabeth visited the mansion, and when Henry VIII. met there his sister, Queen Margaret of Scotland. Ancient though it is, it does not go back