82 THE BATH ROAD 



"None to hurt au old friend, you may be sure," 

 answered the lawyer ; " only those twelve votes you 

 boasted about must be given to our side instead of 

 yours ; " which was accordingly arranged. 



In those days, as will already have been seen, 

 Hounslow Heath was a very real place indeed. There 

 was (as the journalistic slang of to-day has it) 

 "actuality" about that then solitary and barren 

 waste, which is not a little dijfficult to realize 

 nowadays. The cyclist who speeds over the level 

 roads and past the smiling orchards and market 

 gardens, finds it difficult to believe that this was 

 the sinister place of eighty years ago ; and, since there 

 is no Heath to-day, is apt to come to the conclusion 

 that it must have been the very "Mrs. Harris" of 

 heaths ; a figment, that is to say, of romantic writers' 

 imaginations. Such, however, was by no means the 

 case. Where cultivated lands are now, and where 

 suburban villas stand, there stretched, less than 

 eighty years since, a veritable scene of desolation. 

 Furze-bushes, swampy gravel-pits in which tall 

 grasses and bulrushes grew, and grassy hillocks, the 

 homes of snipe and frogs, and the haunts of the 

 peewit, were the features of the scene by day ; while, 

 when night weis come, the whole place swarmed with 

 footpads and highwaymen. 



At that time Lord Berkeley used frequently to stay 

 at his country house at Cranford, close by, from 

 Saturdays to Mondays, and had twice been stopped 

 and robbed on his way before a third and last 

 encounter, in which he shot his assailant dead. On 

 the second occasion, the door of his travelling carriage 



