Westward a little way, we come to “Swan House.” This modern-antique mansion stands on the site of, and gets its name from, the “Old Swan Tavern,” which has been gone these fifteen years now, and which stood right over the river, with projecting wooden balconies, and a land entrance from Queen’s Road. It and its predecessor—a little lower down the river—were historic public-houses resorted to by parties pleasuring from town; and this was always a house of call for watermen with their wherries, as we find so well pictured in Marryat’s “Jacob Faithful.” Here Pepys turned back on the 9th of April, 1666; having come out for a holiday, and “thinking to have been merry at Chelsey; but being come almost to the house by coach near the waterside, a house alone, I think the Swan,” he learned from a passer-by that the plague had broken out in this suburb, and that the “house was shut up of the sickness. So we with great affright . . . went away for Kensington.” The old fellow—he was young then—was fond of taking boat or coach, “to be merry at Chelsey”; often with Mrs. Knipp, the pretty actress; sometimes with both her and his wife, and then he drily complains to his diary—“and my wife out of humour, as she always is when this woman is by.” Yet the critics claim that he had no sense of fun! Until the “Old Swan” was torn down, it served as the goal for the annual race which is still rowed on the first day of every August from the “Old Swan Tavern” at London Bridge, by the young Thames watermen, for the prize instituted in 1715 by Doggett—that fine low comedian of Queen Anne’s day: a silver medal stamped with the white horse of Hanover (in commemoration of the First George’s coronation), and a waterman’s orange-coloured coat full of pockets, each pocket holding a golden guinea. [Picture: Statue of Sir Han’s Sloane in the Botanic Gardens]