Almost as soon as Mrs. Smith’s hackney coach had brought her to No. 7 Great Portland Street--a house whose site is now covered, as I reckon, by No. 38--Dr. William Hunter, brother of the great John Hunter, arrived from Jermyn Street, and performed his duties with the skill of a Physician-Extraordinary to the Queen. The attendance of such a man proves the material comfort of the Smith family. Nathaniel Smith, the flustered father, was principal assistant to Joseph Nollekens, the sculptor, and he had worked for Joseph Wilton and the great Roubiliac. For Wilton he carved three of the nine masks, representing Ocean and eight British rivers, now seen on the Strand front of Somerset House. He had taken to wife a Miss Tarr, a Quakeress. Their boy’s christening was dictated by family history. He was named John after his grandfather, a Shropshire clothier, whose bust, modelled by Nathaniel Smith, was the first publicly exhibited by the Associated Artists at Spring Gardens; and Thomas after his great-uncle, Admiral Thomas Smith, who had earned in Portsmouth Harbour (more cheaply, perhaps, than Smith would have allowed) the name of “Tom of Ten Thousand.” Smith early went into training to be a gossiping topographer. Old Nollekens, already a Royal Academician, and the most sought-after sculptor of portrait busts (“Well, sir, I think my friend Joe Nollekens can chop out a head with any of them,” was Dr. Johnson’s tribute to his genius), often took his assistant’s little son for a ramble round the streets. One day he led Thomas to the Oxford Road to see Jack Rann go by on the cart to Tyburn, where he was to be hanged for robbing Dr. William Bell of his watch and eighteenpence. The boy remembered all his life the criminal’s pea-green coat, his nankin small-clothes, and the immense nosegay that had been presented to him at St. Sepulchre’s steps. In another walk, Mr. Nollekens showed him the ruins of the Duke of Monmouth’s house in Soho Square. In a Sunday morning ramble they watched the boys bathing in Marylebone Basin, on the site of Portland Place. And, again, they stood at the top of Rathbone Place, while Nollekens recalled the mill from which Windmill Street was named, and the halfpenny hatch which had admitted people to the miller’s grounds.