the water
companies.

To the north-east are the Hampstead ponds, which are supposed to have
been made in Henry VIII.'s reign. They are certainly larger now than
they were in the seventeenth century, and have probably been enlarged
artificially. They are now in possession of the New River Waterworks
Company. The streets on the hill beyond the ponds are all modern.

Gayton Road is composed entirely of modern villas in a continuous
straight line. Many of the streets in the vicinity are in the same
style, and were built over open meadows at a comparatively recent date.
On Downshire Hill is an episcopal chapel with white porch and small
cupola; this is dedicated to St. John.

John Street, like Downshire Hill, has detached residences on either
side. Large brick flats are rising on the ground once covered by Lawn
Bank and Wentworth House. In the former Keats was a welcome visitor from
1818 to 1820, and here he wrote many of his famous poems. Fanny Brawne,
with her mother, occupied the adjacent house.

Rosslyn Hill was formerly called Red Lion Hill, from a public-house
which stood on the site of the present police-station. On the north side
are a Unitarian chapel and schools approached by handsome iron gates.
The chapel is approached from Pilgrim Lane and Kemplay Road, and the
schools from Willoughby Road. There stood near by until within the last
twenty years an old building known as the Chicken House. This is
supposed to have been once a hunting lodge of King James I., though
there is little basis for the tradition. It became later a mean hovel,
the rendezvous for the scum and riffraff of the neighbourhood. It stood
a little back from the road just at the spot where Pilgrim Place now is,
and contained some very curious stained glass in its windows. There was
in one section a portrait of King James I., with an inscription on a
tablet below in French to the effect that the King slept here on August
25, 1619. In another section was a corresponding portrait of the
favourite, Buckingham. Further north there existed another old house
known as Carlisle House. Perhaps this is the one mentioned by Park as a
red-brick Elizabethan house with rubbed quoins, which had been let in
tenements, and was in a ruinous state in 1777.

On the south or western side of Rosslyn Hill there is the police-station
before mentioned, and adjacent an interesting Tudor house, which, though
not old, is well built; this contains the Soldiers' Daughters' H