feel it incumbent on them to do the next best thing, that is, to secure and throw open such fields as lie nearest to London on any side. The same duty appears to me to lie before the Corporation and the City Companies, and the more because the poor, having been a good deal driven out, the funds left for their benefit from the City, which these bodies have inherited, might well be applied to such an object as this. The Metropolitan Board of Works has, I understand, done a good deal in keeping and buying open spaces, but yet more is needed, I believe, and perhaps they may see their way to help. It is a bad thing trying to see other people's duties: they alone can judge what they are. I can only hope that various people will take the question into consideration. I don't know absolutely that the fields of which I have written are the cheapest to be had, nor that there may not be others nearer to dense centres of population. I happen to know the special beauties of these, and their value to our side of London, and to be personally very fond of them, which somewhat disqualifies me from judging of their relative value. I would not, there-fore, plead for these fields in contradistinction to others, though they have their special beauty. What I wish to urge -- and I have only introduced a practical example now vividly in my own mind as