The engine-houses, pumping water and filter-beds of the East London Water Company are the principal features of the Lea Bridge Road, and one would not deny them under certain conditions, and at a certain distance, a grandly impressive quality. At a distance, assuredly, for viewed close at hand, with the giant machinery seen through the windows, slowly pulsing up and down to the accompaniment of a warm scent of oil, and with the lofty chimneys that in their specious ornamentation look afar off _almost_ like Venetian _campanili_, seen really to be sooty smokestacks, it is astonishing how commonplace they become. And when you think of it, considering the matter on the basis of a wide acquaintance with waterworks, how singularly dry, husky, coaly, and gritty, and void of any suggestion of water these gigantic engine-houses of the great water companies always are! The Lea Bridge Road, and indeed Woodford also, and Epping Forest generally, are to be avoided by quiet folks on Saturdays, Sundays, and at times of public holiday, when the costermonger and his purple-faced “missus” drive their cowhocked ponies and attendant traps recklessly to the “Wake Arms,” to the “Robin Hood,” or to the pubs of Chingford, and all the waggonettes and all the beanfeasters in the East End of London are making merry in elephantine fashion. The road finally leaves Walthamstow and the valley of the Lea at Knott’s Green and Whip’s Cross—at the present time an abject, down-at-heel compromise between a striving unsuccessful suburb and the open country. But in these latter days, when the neighbourhood of London changes with such startling rapidity, the true description of to-day may very reasonably be the misleading record of to-morrow, and that squalid air of failure which belongs to those places at the present time of writing may already, ere these lines attain the dignity of print, have given place to an era of substantial and prosperous expansion. Nothing is more depressing than the unsuccessful suburb, created out of nothing by the too sanguine builder in one of his inflated moments. It brings disaster, not only upon the author of its being, who reaps the harvest of his rashness in foreclosed mortgages and the Bankruptcy Court, but upon those enterprising callow tradesfolk who, embarking upon businesses of their own with insufficient resources, cannot tide over the time of no trade, and leave a record of their failure in deserted shops still proclaiming the virtues of the tea that no one ever bought and the advantages of those “bargain sales” that failed to attract. Whip’s Cross, as its name would imply, stands at a junction of roads. It forms the entrance to Epping Forest, and is said to have obtained the first part of its name from being the place whence the Forest deer-stealers were formerly whipped at the cart’s tail; but such things are now quite put out of sight and forgotten in these marchlands of town and suburbs.