with its wide margin of hundreds of added acres, under the wise supervision of skilled conservators, growing year by year into fuller beauty of Nature-planted wild-flowers and indigenous furze and ferns.

Long may the people of the close courts and alleys of London come hither in their tens of thousands on the gold-letter days of their sparse holidays, to revel in the winnowing freshness of its breezy height, and pleasant groves and lanes and grassy nooks, and take back with them to their crowded homes a measure of the health that ‘floats upon the genial atmosphere.’ So shall Hampstead still (as in old Drayton’s time) ‘remain the noblest hill.’

The old Heath covered 220 acres, so that 261 acres acquired by recent purchase up to 1889, have more than doubled the expanse of the old Heath (1899).