A very ancient cut indeed, and one now little better than a ditch, is that of the Temple stream, made for the purpose of the Temple Mills, so called from the manor having anciently belonged to the Knights Templars. The site of the mills is still pointed out by the “White Hart.” The old inn was said to have been built in 1514, and in after years was a reputed haunt of Dick Turpin, that phenomenally ubiquitous highwayman who, if all those legends were true, must have been no single person, but a syndicate, and a large one at that. The house, which bore no evidence of sixteenth-century antiquity on its whitewashed, brick-built face, was a favourite resort of holiday-making East Enders, and, with its long, white front and cheerful old red-tiled roof, seemed a natural part of the scenery, just as the still-extant “White House” or “Old Ferry House” inn, half a mile distant, does to this day. It was, however, wantonly rebuilt in 1900, and replaced by a dull, evil-looking public-house that looks very much down on its luck. The appearance of the old house suggested festivity in the open-air tea and watercresses style; the new is suggestive only of drinking across a bar. But a long-existing privilege still belongs to the property, the landlord being the proprietor of a private toll-bridge leading across the Temple stream to Leyton. He exercises that right in virtue of some predecessor having long ago repaired the broken-down passage when three parishes whose boundaries meet here disputed and declined the liability. Accordingly, although foot-passengers pass freely, a penny is levied upon a bicycle, and upon each head of sheep or cattle, and twopence for carts, carriages, motor-cars, or motor-bicycles, at the little hut where the tollkeeper lounges in a very bored manner. Well may he look so, for although, in exceptional times of holiday, the toll has been known to yield, once or twice, so much as a pound in a day, five shillings is a more usual sum, and there are many days in winter when threepence has been the sum-total of the day’s revenue. [Illustration: THE “VINE TAVERN,” MILE END ROAD.] A similar right is said to belong to the “White House,” where a substantial timber bridge spans the Lea itself, but it lies only on a little-used bridle-path, and the right does not appear to be exercised. The scene here has elements of picturesqueness, and could be made a good subject in colour. In October, 1903, the “Vine,” the old inn that had stood so long and so oddly on “Mile End Waste,” was demolished. Although it had stood there for three hundred years, there was not the slightest trace about the building of any architectural embellishment, the front of it being merely an extremely unlovely and ill-cared-for example of a London public-house, while the back Was a weather-boarded relic of the vanished rural days of the Mile End Road. Like the fly in amber, The thing itself was neither rich nor rare: We only wondered how the devil it got there.