At the same time, it must be confessed, the poet regretted his pet's inveterate tendencies toward "drain architecture." Rossetti's domestic proclivities must, one thinks, have rendered him a terror to his neighbours! Indeed, the only London inhabitant,--if we except the celebrated "Lady of the Cats" in the desecrated Carlyle House,--who can be said to have at all emulated him in that line, was Frank Buckland the great naturalist, who, in his house, No. 34, Albany Street, Regent's Park, kept "a museum and a menagerie in one." "His house was full of crawling, creeping, barking, flying, swimming, and squeaking things." When he was at church one Sunday, "Dick, the rat," he relates, "stole away two five-pound notes from my drawers." Among other creatures Mr. Buckland kept, like Rossetti, a laughing jackass, who "would never laugh," and "who was only provoked to a titter by the consumption of a toothsome mouse"; this pet escaped from its cage one day and was found asleep on the bed of a gentleman near the Hampstead Road. But Mr. Buckland could at any rate excuse his vagaries on scientific grounds, for he was trying to acclimatize foreign animals suitable for food in this country. The fleeting tide of fashion is now at its height in Chelsea; the historic old houses of Cheyne Walk are let at enormous rents, and, year by year, tall, prosaic red-brick edifices spring up like mushrooms all round them. A few old "bits" of Chelsea still remain unaltered,--but very few. The old church, and the rectory, the home of the Kingsleys, with its charming old walled garden, are still delightful; the embankment houses, standing back behind their gardens and ironwork, are fine in their dignified, time-hallowed red-brick; Paradise Row, that picturesque oasis of old dwellings that breaks the ugliness of the modern Queen's Road West, yet bears witness to the charm of old Chelsea. In humble Paradise Row, (now part of Queen's Road West, and converted to laundries and other uses;)--in Paradise Row, with its quaint tiled roofs, dormer windows, and high white gate-posts, many well-known people have lived; it was even connected, more or less, with royalty, for in 1692 it was the dwelling place of the first Duke of St. Albans, Nell Gwynne's son. Chelsea has always been associated with the Stuarts. When it was but a picturesque riverside village,--fishermen's huts diversified by a few old palaces,--divided yet by space of green fields from the storm and stress of the greater London,--they brought it wealth and fashion, and caused its gardens to spread in fragrant greenery down to the water's edge. The Chelsea of the Restoration had the patronage of the aristocracy, as well as that of the Royal favourites; here the King's Mistresses flaunted their grandeur, their extravagance, their impecuniosity before the world. It was in comparatively humble Paradise Row that the notorious Duchesse de Mazarin lived in her later