owner held out his hand, and shouted, "A
shilling, please Sir," it was with the conscious
look of a man who was making money rapidly.

There is an aristocracy on Hampstead Heath
as well as on the turf. There are " touters."
They beset young gentlemen, who have ladies
with them, with as eager an earnestness as the
lookers-out for Boulogne hotels. There are
stern, severe drivers—who manage the extortion
part of the business, and keep the time
upon the ingenious calculations already described
—as well as their serfs, who do not own
the donkeys they drive. To borrow a theatrical
allusion, the former are the " managers," who
pocket the money; the latter are the—not box,
but donkey-keepers, who, instead of being
paid for their office, are allowed to spunge for
an additional fee. But in these fortunate days
of reform, we may hope to see even donkey-riding
reduced to something like a regular
principle, and the fiction of the distance between
Jack Straw's Castle and The Spaniards
Inn, or of the corresponding circuit round the
left side of the Heath, set at rest by a policeman
established at the Grand Downshire Hill
And Hampstead Heath Junction Donkey
Station.

A word about the inns in this quarter. It
is an absurdity to keep up the aristocratic
paraphernalia of heavy private rooms, waiters
never within call, and high prices, at the
present time. When the railways and steamboats
throw open to us so many excursions,
when the superior elegance and varied table
d'hôte of the restaurateurs at such places, and
with a more moderate scale of charges, stares
us in the face at every pier, station, and office,
and in every newspaper, circular, and handbill,
it is folly to suppose that Hampstead will
draw a sufficient number of people to eat
fortnight-old pigeon-pies, and drink dry
brandied sherry, at tariffs somewhat above
those of Regent Street. Nor will ill-attended
tea-gardens attract the less aristocratic caste
of visitors. Till there is a more regular as
well as a more reasonable system of refreshments
and prices, the inn business of the
Heath must be confined to a few half-reputable
rollicking parties, a few practical old
gentlemen, who go there because they used
to do so; and pay old prices to keep up old
associations.

But we have done grumbling. Even the
weather is too fine to let us enjoy that genuine
Englishman's privilege; and—to use a cruelly
hackneyed, most improper, but favourite
metaphor—we are fairly launched upon the
Heath. The view is glorious. If we step upon
the ridges, we look down upon a wide expanse
of shaggy bushes, tipped with golden blossoms,
forming all sorts of imaginary grottoes,
labyrinths, and retreats. Did you ever play
at " being lost " on Hampstead Heath? If
not, do so with the very first company of pretty
young ladies you can get out with. What
with the pleasantry of crouching down in
places where you never thought you could be
seen, and watching a distant bonnet and
parasol tracking you in precisely the reverse
direction, we cannot recommend better fun.
Moreover, the narrow, slippery, sandy, turf-starving
ridges, where stunted grass and moss
grow together, till you cannot tell which is
which—the pleasing chances of slipping down,
the excitement of stepping through a small
plantation of nettles, or trying to step over
some awkwardly straggling brambles—no
one who has not spent six or seven consecutive
hours on Hampstead Heath can
appreciate these, and a hundred other of its
delights.

But civilisation will not be quiet. It will
not leave even the left side of the Heath to
the donkeys and the human beings who want
to enjoy themselves. Here and there a gravel-pit
has been cut out, and (if they will not make
too many of them, and then build near them,)
they are rather an improvement. They look
rough, bold, and rock-like. Moreover, like
the Indian temples at Salsette or Edfou, they
are pleasantly chiselled all over with the
devices and initials of various individuals, who
seem to go through the world like savages,
with clasp-knives in their hands, and whose
earthly mission is tattooing. The same spirit
that leads Englishmen to write poetry in
the heavy arbours of Kensington Gardens,
is equally developed in the carving their
names or initials on the red-ochre façade of
a Hampstead Heath gravel-pit.

Sit down amidst the furze, low enough to
have no forms around you; its dark, rough,
broken outlines standing out boldly against
the clear blue sky above, or, perhaps, perched
on the root of one of the cedar firs, from which
the gravelly soil has gradually receded by a
series of Lilliputian land-slips, with a larger
and more noble prospect before you; and, while
we revel in the clear, healthy air around us,
we think with pain upon any prospect of
change. Scarcely can we realise even in idea
this beautiful wilderness hedged, ditched,
drained, furrowed, and submitted to all the
other useful cruelties of agriculture. Still
less do we think of its appropriation to
forming select parks and paddocks for villa
mansions. Little thankful should we be for
regular, correct pathways, neatly laid down
with powdered sea-shells, getting dry after
every shower, and always looking unpicturesque,
orderly, and public-requested-not-to-walk-on-the-grass-ified.
While we look at the
free open space, with no intruders but ourselves,
an occasional cow, quite astonished at
her own independence, or a bevy of donkey-mounted
girls, we begin to think that all we
have heard or read about notions of enclosing
Hampstead Heath are a fiction, a cry got up
by agitators, to drown some other cry.

But, as we cross to the other side of the
Heath, and wend our way towards the " Vale
of Health," we find that there is less of fiction,
less of impossibility, than we supposed. What
have those neat, Tunbridge-brick, with white