e
cottages to Battersea Rise, and then up the hill past the old smithy that
dated from 1626, on to the Common and across it to the end of Nightingale
Lane, and along a footpath across where the Station and the St. James's
School now stand. It was then all common, and down Wandsworth Lane to
the Wheatsheaf on the main road.

Everything here was in evidence of the Derby proper. All the gentlemen's
houses had stands erected inside the front gardens, and the walls
decorated with festoons of scarlet, most of them making it quite a gala
day having dinner parties to see the visitors in their grand equipages,
for the turn-outs of the aristocracy and royalty surpassed everything to
be seen anywhere in Europe. All the shops and private houses had their
windows decorated and full of visitors. It was reported that thirty
thousand horses at that time went to Epsom on the Derby Day along the
road at this point. The wayfarers to the Derby were mostly
horsey-looking tramps with pails on their shoulders in twos and threes,
very shabby and down-at-heel. Both men and women, with almost every toy
or trinket you could mention; tin trumpets, squeakers, masks to sell on
the road, came slouching along; then came barrows, trucks, donkey and
pony carts, with all sorts of eatables, such as sheep's trotters, whelks,
oysters, bread and cheese, fried sausages, saveloys, fish, ham and beef
sandwiches, ginger beer and table beer--at that time it was allowed to be
sold without a license. They would stroll along the road till they found
a suitable pitch, and would there establish themselves. There were
numerous parties of musicians in gangs of three or four, harp, violin and
cornet, or cornet, trombone and French horn; armies of acrobats and
children on stilts, conjuring, Punch and Judy shows; in fact, some on
every open space all down the road to the Downs.

The road through the village of Tooting to the Broadway, where you turned
off in the Mitcham Road, was the most crowded, for some of the traffic
divided and went straight on through Merton and Ewell to Epsom, but the
greater part went by the Mitcham Road, past Daniel Defoe's house and
Fig's Marsh, a long strip of marsh common on one side and the herb and
lavender gardens on the other, and a number of wooden cottages with long
gardens in front, that made quite a harvest by selling nosegays and
refreshments. This extended all the way to the village of Mitcham, the
Upper Green at which the P