well kept. The parochial schools, in two
buildings, for boys and girls, are in the Ponsonby Road on the hillside,
and between them is a church, completed in 1899. In the High Street,
which is built up with small shops for a short distance, stands on the
north side, well back from the road, the King's Head Inn, with its
wonderful signboard displayed in the garden, its big, old-fashioned
bay-windows, curious low-ceilinged rooms, and weather-boarded sides,
shaded by great elms, giving it a very picturesque aspect. The gardens,
with tables set out in little nooks, and the stables of the house
across the yard, complete a picture, of which few are to be found near
London now. In this street is one of the buildings of St. Mary's
Convent, a red-brick pile used as a laundry.

Returning to Roehampton Lane, and passing up the rise to the south, we
come to the Alton Road, lined with good houses, and a little to the west
the Bessborough Road falls into it, and runs through a favourite
residential district built up with fine dwellings. Here the hollows made
by gravel-digging on the edge of the heath are being, in a measure,
filled up with earth from the building going on near by, and opposite
The Elms, on the brow of the common, a peculiar tomblike building is
noticed. This is merely a spring-house covering the artesian well that
supplies the drinking-fountain in the village. At Highwood, a
solidly-built mansion, we come to the Portsmouth Road, and after passing
several villas, to Kingston Road at the foot of the hill. Here, on the
west side, Richmond Park stretches parallel with the road, the enclosing
wall being so close to the road as to give the houses hardly any garden;
still, from here to the Robin Hood Gate there are many pretty villas,
and at Beverley Brook a row of cottages has been erected close to the
wall. On the east side of the road a new cemetery of the Putney Burial
Board is under the lee of the hill, and beyond are fields stretching
southward, running up to and meeting Wimbledon Common. In the hollow
adjoining the main road is the Newlands Farmhouse to which these acres
belong, and adjoining is the Halfway House, at one time an inn said to
have been the favourite drinking-place of the highwayman Abershaw. Stag
Lane leads to the common, and further on Beverley Brook is crossed, here
a narrow strip of Wimbledon Common meets the highroad. This stream from
here, through the park, and across Barnes Common into the Thames,