Mrs. Arthur Stannard. ("John Strange Winter")

Emerging from the Earl's Court Station, where once stood the old manor house of the De Veres, and glancing at the noble row of buildings across the road, which until quite lately was the site of a _maison de sante_, it seems impossible to realise that it was at the end of the last century a miniature private zoological garden. Yet here the great anatomist and surgeon, John Hunter, kept a collection of rare and foreign animals; here, too, was the kitchen and the great cauldron in which he performed the gruesome operation of boiling down the giant O'Brien, whose skeleton can be seen in the museum of the College of Surgeons. It is to be hoped that the ghost of the big Irishman was safely laid when the work of destruction was carried on! Turning to the left, you go down Trebovir road, past the great red-stepped house of the well-known and successful "crammer" and army coach, Captain Pinhey, which leads out into Nevern square.

Perhaps in nothing more than in the present style of building does the growing artistic spirit of the day assert itself. Although the houses are not erected with the solid masonry of other days, which seemed to defy the hand of time, they rejoice in more picturesque effects, and certainly the handsome, spacious Nevern-square, with its large gardens, its three well-kept tennis courts, and its fine red-brick dwellings, is a striking instance of the fact.