first time I saw Charles and Henry they were boys about twelve and fourteen.  I met them in the rectory garden at the giving of prizes to the St. Luke’s National School boys, when they were regaled with buns and milk.  The rector and the boys were great favourites with the parishioners as they were courteous and very free with everybody.  I can recognize many of the characters in “The Hillyars and the Burtons” as old Chelsea inhabitants, and the description of the mounds and tablets in old Chelsea Church and the Churchyard, and the outlook over the river is as correct as it well can be.

Opposite the Church in the corner by the Church draw-dock stood the cage, and by the side of it the stocks, then came Lombard Street, and the archway with shops and wharfs all along the riverside up to Battersea Bridge.  At that time there were fishing boats, and fishermen got a living by catching roach,

dace, dabs and flounders, and setting pots for eels all along Chelsea Reach, and between Battersea Bridge and Putney, and they would hawk them through the streets of a morning.  The eels were carried in little tubs, as many as eight or ten, one on top of the other, on the man’s head, and sold by the lot in each tub at about sixpence or eightpence each.

The favourite promenade, especially on a Sunday, was the River Terrace at the back of Chelsea Hospital.  It was thrown open to the public, and you gained access to it from the gate of the private gardens opposite King Charles’ statue.  It consisted of a gravelled terrace and a dwarf wall on the river side, with two rows of immense elms commencing at the outlet of Ranelagh Ditch to the river, and ending at the Round House.  On the corner by Ranelagh Ditch stood the College Water Works, with the old machinery going to decay, that had been used to pump water for the use of the hospital.  This was a grand place, and considered extremely fashionable, where most of the courting and flirting by the young people was carried on.  The Ranelagh Ditch was the boundary of the hospital grounds at that tune, and was an open stream about nine feet wide; while its banks were supported by planks and struts across it.  It was open right up to the end of Eaton Place.  It was crossed by two bridges, one

called Ranelagh, in the Pimlico Road, by the side of the “Nell Gwynn” tavern, the other called Bloody Bridge, in the King’s Road, between Sloane Square and Westbourne Street.  On the banks of this foul and offensive stream there was no better than a common sewer.  Between the two bridges at the back of George Street and overlooking it, were crowded together a lot of old two and three-roomed cottages that periodically at high tide were flooded by the offensive matter.  The district was known as Frog’s Island, and suffered terribly in the outbreak of cholera in 1832.  It was inhabited by a class that was always in a chronic state of poverty, and as there had been a very severe winter, that had a great deal to do with it.  I think this stream is now covered over.  It had its rise from the overflow in the Serpentine, in Hyde Park, and crossed under the road at Knightsbridge, about where Albert Gate now stands, into the Park. [32]

CHAPTER 5.—Old-time Chelsea.

It was a grand sight on the first of May to see the four-horse mail coaches pass along Knightsbridge at eight in the evening.  As many as fourteen would pass all in their new livery of scarlet coats and broad-brimmed top hats, trimmed with gold lace, the guards blowing their horns.  I have seen them take up passengers at the top of Sloane Street, who arrived there in one of the old two-horse hackney coaches, and it appeared quite an undertaking to get the passengers on board.  They would branch off there, some going along the upper road through Kensington, and the others along the Fulham Road and across the river at Putney.  The road from Chelsea to Buckingham Palace was mostly through fields, some of them called the Five Fields (now Eaton Square and neighbourhood), extending as far as Grosvenor Place and St. George’s Hospital, which you could see from the toll-gate in Sloane Squire, the only building on that part being Eaton Chapel.  The road to the Palace was very lonely, as there were but few houses.  The Chelsea Bun Houses—there were two of them—

stood on the left side of the Pimlico Road, about one hundred yards beyond the toll-gate by the “Nell Gwynn” tavern.  The first one kept at that time by London, had a frontage of at least fifty feet.  It was built out fifteen or twenty feet from the house, and had a colonnade in front over the pathway; the other, kept by Chapman, was two doors further on, of the same style but much smaller.  On a Good Friday morning I have seen a large crowd waiting to get served, which they did through the window.  I have seen carriages and traps waiting as far as the tollhouse.  A little farther on, where St. Barnabas’ Church now stands, was the “Orange” tavern and tea gardens, with a theatre where regular plays were acted, and beyond, just before you came to the wooden bridge over the canal there was a road leading down to the Chelsea Water Works reservoir and filtering beds, and at the bottom stood the “White House,” with its ferry over to the “Red House” at Battersea, a great sporting riverside house, where nearly all the pigeon shooting took place.  There was always a great crowd of amateur sportsmen outside waiting for a shot at any birds that escaped, and frequently a dispute would arise as to who shot the bird, often ending in a fight.

There were no buildings on the right hand side of

the road, but some marshy ground and a row of willow trees between it and the canal as far as the basin, which was surrounded by a few shops and wharves, and where Victoria Station now stands.  And nearly opposite stood Bramah’s Iron Foundry, where nearly the first iron lighthouse was built and fitted together and erected in the yard complete, and then taken and shipped to one of the West India Islands, I think Jamaica, and re-erected.  It was afterward’s Bramah’s Great Unpickable Lock Factory.

At the other side of the canal was the Willow Walk, a raised road leading from the Monster Gardens to Rochester Row, with market gardens and low swampy ground running right down to the river on one side, and the canal on the other.  In winter I have seen snipe, teal and wild duck shot on the ground at the west end of Chelsea.  Just over Stamford Bridge stood Stamford House, once the residence of Nell Gwynn, now occupied by the Gas Company’s engineer, and just beyond, through a farm yard, was a public footpath right through the orchards and market gardens alongside of the river right away to a riverside tavern, with a lane bringing you out by Parson’s Green.  In the orchards was grown some of the choicest fruit to be found in the country.  There were some old walls

with fruit trees that appeared to have stood there for centuries.  This district was known as Broom-house, and was owned and occupied by the Bagleys, Steels, Matters, and Dancers, market gardeners and fruit growers.  Higher up the river at Hammersmith, Chiswick and Isleworth were the strawberry gardens that supplied London with that delicious fruit.  They were carried to Covent Garden Market twice a day by women in