Chadwell Street, a wayside hamlet, conducts past Beacontree Heath, on the right, to an open country of disconsolate-looking contorted elms and battered windmills, telling even in the noontide heats and still airs of summer of the winter winds that race across the watery flats of Rippleside and Dagenham Marshes, out of the shivering east. Lonely, until quite recent times, stood "Whalebone House," beside the road, the two whalebones that even yet surmount its garden entrance the wonderment for more than two hundred years of chance travellers. Legends tell that they are relics of a whale stranded in the Thames in the year of Oliver Cromwell's death, and set up here in memory of him. However that may be, they certainly were here in 1698, when Ogilby's _Britannia_ was published, for the house is marked on his map as "Ye Whalebone." These "rude ribs," it may shrewdly be suspected, have little longer yet to remain, for though apparently proof against decay, the house and grounds are, like those of the surrounding properties, for sale to the builders. [Illustration: WHALEBONE HOUSE.] The sole historic or other vestige remaining of the "Whalebone" turnpike-gate, once standing here, is an account to be found in the newspapers of the time of an attack made upon George Smith, the toll-keeper, on a night in 1829. He was roused in the darkness by a voice calling "Gate!" and, going to open it, was instantly knocked down, in a manner somewhat similar to the treatment accorded the hero of that touching nursery rhyme, who tells how:-- "Last night and the night before, Three tom-cats came knocking at my door. I went down to let them in, And they knocked me down with a rolling-pin." The two men who felled the unfortunate George Smith, alarmed by his cries of "Murder!" threatened to shoot him if he were not quiet, and, going over his pockets, were rewarded by a find of twenty-five shillings. While they were thus engaged in sorting him over, a third confederate, ransacking the house, discovered three pounds. With this booty and a parting kick, they left their victim, and disappeared as silently as they came. XV ROMFORD, now approached, is but twelve miles from London, and has frankly given up the impossible and ceased all pretence of being provincial. At the same time, building-land having only just (in the speculator's phrase) become "ripe for development," the townlet has not yet lost all individuality in suburban extension.