Here, on many a summer’s evening, Gainsborough, accompanied by his friend Collins, amused himself by sketching docks and nettles, which afforded the Wynants and Cuyp-like effects to the foregrounds of his rich and glowing landscapes. Collins resided in Tothill Fields, and was the modeller of rustic subjects for tablets of chimneypieces in vogue about seventy years back. Most of them were taken from Æsop’s Fables, and are here and there to be met with in houses that have been suffered to remain in their original state. I recollect one, that of the “Bear and Bee-hives,” in the back drawing-room of the house formerly the mansion of the Duke of Ancaster on the western side of Lincoln’s Inn Fields.[406] Millbank, which originally extended with its pollarded willows from Belgrave House[407] to the White Lead Mills at the corner of the lane leading to “Jenny’s Whim,” afforded similar subjects to those selected by four of the old rural painters; for instance, the boat-builders’ sheds on the bank, with their men at work on the shore, might have been chosen by Everdingen;[408] the wooden steps from the bank, the floating timber, and old men in their boats, with the Vauxhall and Battersea windmills, by Van Goyen;[409] the various colours of the tiles of the cart-sheds, entwined by the autumnal tinged vines, backed with the most prolific orchards, with the women gathering the garden produce for the ensuing day’s market, would have pleased Ruysdael;[410] and the basket-maker’s overhanging smoking hut, with a woman in her white cap and sunburnt petticoat, dipping her pail for water, might have been represented by the pencil of Dekker.[411] It was within one of the Neat House Gardens[412] near this bank that Garnerin’s kitten descended from the balloon which ascended from Vauxhall Gardens in the year 1802.[413] This descent is thus handed down in a song attributed to George Colman the younger, entitled PUSS IN A PARACHUTE. Poor puss in a grand parachute Was sent to sail down through the air, Plump’d into a garden of fruit, And played up old gooseberry there. The gardener, transpiring with fear, Stared just like a hundred stuck hogs; And swore, though the sky was quite clear, ’Twas beginning to rain cats and dogs. Mounseer, who don’t value his life, In the Thames would have just dipped his vings, If it vasn’t for vetting his vife, For vimen are timbersome things: So at Hampstead he landed her dry; And after this dangerous sarvice, He took a French leave of the sky, And vent back to Vauxhall in a Jarvis. 1828.