A little intricate turn, opposite the new County School buildings, into Glebe Place brings us, at the south-east corner, to Henry VIII.’s Hunting Lodge, a tiny dwelling, with beautiful fish-scale tiling, and so narrow a doorway that our ordinary conception of King Hal’s figure seems to give the lie to this tradition. But Henry was doubtless of slenderer build when he came to shoot bernagle on the riverside, and incidentally to court Mistress Jane Seymour; it is worth asking the present occupier of the little house for permission to see the ladder stairway to the floor above. Again we are amazed to think how Henry ever mounted it; the Lodge, as it is called still, must have been very convenient in old days to that Tudor Lane which divided Upper Cheyne Row and ran straight to the Thames side, where in the reeds of the Battersea shore wild geese were plentiful. The gardens at the back of the Cheyne Walk houses east of Oakley Street are all hallowed ground, for here without a doubt stretched the lawns and glades of the royal pleasaunce, where “Katheryn the Queene” waited so anxiously for the Lord High Admiral—her fourth husband, it is true, but her first love; where she bade him play with romance, at the little gate in the fields, in the letter which he told her not to write but which she could not resist writing. [Illustration: _Photo by Miss Muriel Johnston._ HENRY VIII.’S HUNTING LODGE. p. 60] ] Presently, Elizabeth the hoyden was romping and flirting with her stepfather in these very precincts, and poor Queen Katharine was sadly disillusioned and crept away to Sudeley to die. Anne of Cleves may have paced here in sedate Dutch fashion, debating whether she should invite her whilom husband to tea, which she certainly did and found it quite entertainment enough. Lady Jane Grey visited here, and as Guildford Dudley lived hard by, perhaps conducted her priggish courtship under these very trees. By-and-by Sir Hans Sloane is wheeled up in his invalid chair and matures his practical plans for breaking up the estate and sending a tide of new building over Chelsea. Afterwards, when each house had its individual garden, the company that flocked to Cheyne Walk was, in Georgian times, scarcely less distinguished, and in our own day no less interesting: some magnet quality in the very earth surely brings those who are dear and delightful to rest in Chelsea by the river? NOTES CHAPTER VIII Carlyle’s and Rossetti’s monuments—Paradise Row as it used to be—Hortense de Mazarin—Whistler’s White House and the Victoria Hospital—The Physick Garden—Swan Walk and Doggett’s race for the “Coat and Badge”—The Royal Hospital—Poor, pretty Nelly’s pleasure house—The Chapel—The Hall—An American offer—A French Eagle—Walpole House and a Queen at dinner—Ranelagh and its Rotunda—The Pensioners’ Gardens.