or November. Old London is disappearing
day by day, but bits of it remain, bits dear to those familiar with
them, bits worth the enterprise of the adventurous, which call for frank
admiration and frank praise even of people who hated London as fully as
Heinrich Heine did. But of all parts of the great capital none perhaps
deserve so fully the title to be called beautiful as some portions of
Hampstead Heath.

Some such reflections floated lightly through the mind of a man who
stood, on this May afternoon, on a high point of Hampstead Hill. He had
climbed thither from a certain point just beyond the Regent's Park, to
which he had driven from Knightsbridge. From that point out the way was
a familiar way to him, and he enjoyed walking along it and noting old
spots and the changes that time had wrought. Now, having reached the
highest point of the ascent, he paused, standing on the grass of the
heath, and turning round, with his back to the country, looked down upon
the town.

There is no better place from which to survey London. To impress a
stranger with any sense of the charm of London as a whole, let him be
taken to that vantage-ground and bidden to gaze. The great city seemed
to lie below and around him as in a hollow, tinged and glorified by the
luminous haze of the May day. The countless spires which pointed to
heaven in all directions gave the vast agglomeration of buildings
something of an Italian air; it reminded the beholder agreeably of
Florence. To right and to left the gigantic city spread, its grey wreath
of eternal smoke resting lightly upon its fretted head, the faint roar
of its endless activity coming up distinctly there in the clear windless
air. The beholder surveyed it and sighed slightly, as he traced
meaningless symbols on the turf with the point of his stick.

'What did Caesar say?' he murmured. 'Better be the first man in a village
than the second man in Rome! Well, there never was any chance of my
being the second man in Rome; but, at least, I have been the first man
in my village, and that is something. I suppose I reckon as about the
last man there now. Well, we shall see.'

He shrugged his shoulders, nodded a farewell to the city below him, and,
turning round, proceeded to walk leisurely across the Heath. The grass
was soft and springy, the earth seemed to answer with agreeable
elasticity to his tread, the air was exquisitely clear, keen, and
exhilarating. He began to move more briskly, fee