Change, in fact, looms large upon the home stretches of the road, and even Barnet Fair is threatened with extinction. Threatened men and threatened institutions live long, but at last some one or something puts a period to their existence; and they are in the end, when people have almost come to consider them immortal, cut off with suddenness. Barnet Fair will doubtless in the near future follow most other fairs into the past tense; but meanwhile, although considered moribund by many, it is without doubt extremely lively. And it is just this lusty liveliness that will, paradoxically, cause its abolition; for the crowds of horse-dealers, and East-End and low-life Londoners in general, who are attracted to it for its annual three days, commencing on the first Monday in September, are not favourably regarded by the “residential” classes of Barnet and the district; although the tradespeople seem to look upon them with tolerably friendly eyes. Opinions are divided, as they must needs be when such opposite ideals of life prevail. The “residents” want peace and quietness: the tradespeople want trade, and they apparently have the ear of the vestry, which so long since as 1888 passed a resolution that as the fair at that time brought over 20,000 people into the district and was the means of some £10,000 to £12,000 being spent there, it would be a great hardship to the commercial classes in Barnet if it were abolished. A memorial was presented to the then Home Secretary praying that the fair should be continued, and the petition proved successful. [Sidenote: _BARNET FAIR_] “Improvements” have not been lacking of late in Barnet. That they are improvements admits of no doubt, for they have caused the widening of the roadway at a narrow point, and have disclosed the noble parish church to view, It was built in at its eastern end, at some bygone period, with a quaint old house and shop; a picturesque jumble, and one which has, to some, left an aching void in its disappearance. This odd excrescence was an old-world baker’s shop, with carpenter-Gothic stuccoed little house above: not (as may be gathered) admirable for the purity of its style. Like the fly in amber, it was neither rich nor rare, but one speculated on what brought it in such a strange conjunction, built on to the end of the church in such a manner that the uninstructed stranger was at a loss to tell where the ecclesiastical building ended and the merely secular one began. [Illustration: MONKEN HADLEY CHURCH.]