“I walked to Redbourn to dinner, which consisted of a plain but delicious repast at a very humble pothouse. Here I remarked a horseshoe nailed inside the weather board of the door, and on my pretending ignorance of its purpose, and asking what it was for, an old wrinkled dame, seemingly the mother of the household, told me with perfect seriousness that it was to keep all witches and bewitched persons and things out of the place, and that so long as it remained there nothing under the influence of witchcraft could enter. “At St. Albans I walked amid the ruins of the Old Abbey, having previously passed a fragment of a wall in the meadows below, undoubtedly a part of the remains of the British city of Verulam. I lingered rather long with these scenes, and it was getting dark when I passed the Obelisk at Barnet, where the famous battle was fought in the Wars of the Roses. Every step I advanced to-day, the people, their houses, and their manners, became more Londonish; and it will not then appear surprising that at the first public-house I went into I was made welcome to comfortable quarters, and so remained there during the night. The next morning I walked into London, and took my breakfast at a coffee-house.” XI Islington is but a mile and a quarter from the General Post Office. Even eighty years ago it was only semi-rural. London, in fact, is really after all a slow-moving monster, and although there are, here and there, instances of swift extension, the Great City enlarges itself as a rule with elephantine deliberation. At Islington, in the heyday of the coaching era, you first experienced the sensation of being on the road to anywhere in particular; for there, on Islington Green, stood the first turnpike gates. On the hither side was London: once through them, and you were definitely in the country. As the illustration shows, characteristically urban streets of houses had then begun to appear, but the cocks and hens and the drove of sheep in the road present a rural appearance, and in the distance the church seems to stand amid rustic bowers. Beyond the village of Islington lay the open road again, and travellers still, as they came to Ring Cross, spoke fearfully of the gibbet that had stood there, and hoped the memory of such things had not died out, nor ceased to be a warning to malefactors. [Illustration: ISLINGTON GREEN, 1825.] Ring Cross has long since disappeared from the map. It stood, according to such careful cartographers as John Rocque and his coadjutors in 1746, at a point three and a half miles from London, now to be identified with the junction of the Holloway Road and the Benwell and Hornsey Roads, which then, under the fearful name of “Devil’s Lane,” led to the remote hamlet of Crouch End. [Sidenote: _SCENES OF DREAD_]