And the house at Chiswick was a possession of Hogarth's. It was not then choked up with buildings, but stood cosy and secluded in its well-stored garden of walnut, mulberry, and apple trees, with the head-stones to the poor fellow's pets--the bullfinch and dog Dick, who died the same year as his master; and a very old mulberry tree stricken by lightning, and only held together by the iron braces made by his directions, perhaps applied with his own hands. How full of memorials of the dead painter! Pen-and-ink sketches on the panels of the wainscoted room on the ground floor: and the painting-room over the stables, with its large window, probably one of _his_ improvements on first taking the house, looking on to the pleasant garden below. Doubtless the widow locked up the painting-room, and kept the key on the ring at her girdle. Years after, Sir Richard Phillips jotted down his memories of Chiswick--how he, a schoolboy then with his eyes just above the pew door, the bells in the old tower chiming for church, watched 'Widow Hogarth and her maiden relative, Richardson, walking up the aisle, draped in their silken sacks, their raised head-dresses, their black calashes, their lace ruffles, and their high crooked canes, preceded by their aged servant Samuel: who after he had wheeled his mistress to church in her Bath-chair, carried the prayer-books up the aisle, and opened and shut the pew.' State and dignity still remained to the widow; and there, up in the organ loft, was the quaint group of choristers Hogarth had so admirably sketched, headed by the Sexton Mortefee, grimacing dreadfully as he leads on his terrible band to discord. A square, ugly church enough, with the great Devonshire pew--a small parlour with the roof off--half blocking up the chancel: a thing to be forgiven _then_, for the lovely Duchess sat there, and the sight of her angel head was surely enough to give new zest to the congregation's prayers and praises. A church such as Hogarth often drew, with its 'three-decker' arrangement of desks: the clerk, the reader, and the preacher, rising one above the other, and, top of all, one of those old-fashioned massive, carved sounding-boards, which gave so queer a Jack-in-the-box aspect to the pulpit, and prompted dreamers in dreary sermons, heedless of George Herbert's counsel that if nothing else, the sermon 'preacheth patience,' to speculate on severing the iron rod that supported the board, letting it fall, and so, by one process shutting up, so to speak, both preacher and preaching.