SUBURBAN CHANGES 6i 



many winters have fallen. The crow's-feet have not 

 yet gathered around the corners of my eyes ; and yet 

 I have known many rural, or semi-rural, villages 

 around the ever-spreading circle of the Great City 

 which in my time have been for ever engulfed in the 

 on-rolling waves of bricks and mortar. It is no 

 effort of memory for me, or for many another, to 

 recall the market gardens, the orchards, the open 

 meadows, and the fine old seventeenth and eighteenth 

 century red-brick mansions, each one enclosed within 

 its high garden walls, with the jealous seclusion of a 

 monastery, which occupied the sites where the streets 

 of Brompton, Earl's Court, Fulhani, Walham Green, 

 and Putney now stretch their interminable ramifica- 

 tions, and are accounted, justly enough, as London. 

 Tell me, if you can, what are the bounds of London, 

 north, south, east, or west. Does from Forest Gate 

 on the east, to Eichmoud on the west, span its limits 

 in one direction ? and from Wood Green on the 

 northern heights, to Croydon on the south, encompass 

 it on the other ? They may in this year of grace, 

 but where will the boundary of continuous brick and 

 mortar be set ten years hence ? and wdiere will then 

 be the pleasant resorts of the present-day wheelman ? 

 They will all be ruined, and not, mark you, ruined 

 from the commercial point of view, for the coming of 

 the builder spells riches for the suburban freeholder, 

 whose land, in the slang of the surveying fraternity, 

 has become "ripe." These rustic places are, neverthe- 

 less, rained from the point of view of the lover of 

 the picturesque, and when he sees the old mansions 

 going, the meadows trenched for foundations, and the 



