The tramway line, progressing through Edmonton in single track, goes on in hesitating fashion some little distance beyond Edmonton Green, and terminates in a last feeble, expiring effort on the open road, midway between Edmonton and Ponder's End; like the railhead of some African desert line halting on the edge of a perilous country. Where it ends there stands, solitary, a refreshment house, so like the last outpost of civilisation that the wayfarer whimsically wonders whether he had not better provision himself liberally before adventuring into the flats that lie so stark and forbidding before him.

It is indeed an uninviting waste. On it the gipsy caravans halt; here the sanguine speculative builder projects a street of cheap houses and generally leaves derelict "carcases" of buildings behind him; here the brick-maker and the market-gardener contend with one another, and the shooters of rubbish bring their convoys of dust, dirt, and old tins from afar. On the skyline ahead are factory chimneys, and to the east—the only gracious note in the whole scene—the wooded hills of Essex, across the malodorous Lea.

This desolate tract is bounded by the settlement of Ponder's End, an old roadside hamlet. "Ponder's End," says Lamb, "emblematic name, how beautiful!" Sarcasm that, doubtless, for of what it is emblematic, and where lies the beauty of either place or name, who shall discover? The name has a heavily ruminative or contemplative sound, a little out of key with its modern note. For even Ponder's End has been rudely stirred up by the pitchfork of progress and bidden go forward, and new terraces of houses and shops—no, not shops, nothing so vulgar; "business premises" if you please—have sprung up, and the oldest inhabitant is distraught with the changes that have befallen. Where he plodded in the mud there are pavements; the ditch into whose unsavoury depths he has fallen many a time when returning late from the old Two Brewers is filled up, and the Two Brewers itself has changed from a roadside tavern to something resplendent in plate-glass and brilliant fittings. Our typical ancient and his friends, the market-gardening folk and the loutish waggoners, are afraid to enter. Nay, even the name of the village or hamlet, or urban district, or whatever the exact slang term of the Local Government Board for its modern status may be, is not unlikely to see a change, for to the newer inhabitants it sounds derogatory to be a Ponder's Ender.

To this succeeds another strip of sparsely-settled land, and you think that here, at last, the country is gained. Vain thought! Enfield Highway, a populous mile-length, dispels all such ideas, and even Enfield Wash, where the travellers of old were content to be drenched in the frequent floods, so long as they actually escaped with their lives, is suburban and commonplace. The stretch of road between the Wash and Waltham Cross still goes by the shivery name of Freezywater.

Enfield Highway, like Ponder's End, was until quite recently stodged in sloughs, and resolutely old-world; almost as old world indeed as when, in 1755, Mr. Spencer, the Lord Spencer of a few years later, came up from the shires in great state with his bride. Their procession consisted of three chariots, each drawn by six horses and escorted by two hundred horsemen. At sight of this cavalcade the whole neighbourhood was up in arms. The timid fled, the Jacobites rejoiced and ran off to ring the church bells in a merry peal, while loyal folks and brave armed themselves with pitchforks, pokers, and spades; for all thought the Pretender had come again and was marching on London.

At Waltham Cross, formerly entered through a toll-gate, Middlesex is left behind and Hertfordshire gained. The name of Waltham Cross probably does not at this period inspire anyone with dread, but that was the feeling with which travellers approached it at any time between 1698 and 1780; for this was in all those years a neighbourhood where highwaymen robbed and slew with impunity. Here was the favourite lurk of those desperate disbanded soldiers who on the Peace of Ryswick, finding pay and occupation gone, banded together, and, building huts in the coverts of Epping Forest, came forth even in broad daylight, and, to the number of thirty, armed with swords and pistols, held up the traffic on this and the surrounding roads. Even when that formidable gang was disposed of by calling out the Dragoon Guards in a regular campaign against them, there were others, for in 1722 a London morning paper stated that the turnpike-men from Shoreditch to Cheshunt had been furnished with speaking-trumpets, "as well to give notice to Passengers as to each other in case any Highwaymen or footpads are out," and the satisfactory report is added, "we don't find that any robbery has been committed in that quarter since they have been furnished with them, which has been these two months." Was it not hereabouts, too, that Turpin first met Tom King, and, taking him for an ordinary citizen, proposed to rob him? Ay, and in that self-same Epping Forest, whose woodlands may even yet be seen, away to the right-hand, Turpin had his cave. Even so late as 1775 the Norwich stage was attacked one December morning by seven highwaymen, three of whom the guard shot dead. He would perhaps have finished the whole of them had his ammunition not failed and he in turn been shot, when the coach was robbed at leisure by the surviving desperadoes.