There was an Irish servant of Sir Hans Sloane, one Salter, who established himself in 1695 as a barber in a little house in Cheyne Walk which stood on the site of the present Nos. 17 and 18: “six doors beyond Manor Street,” contemporary papers say, and I have no doubt this is the correct site. Salter was a thin little man, with a hungry look as of one fond of philosophy or of fretting; and Vice-Admiral Munden, just home from years of service on the Spanish coast, dubbed him, in a freak, Don Saltero, a title he carried to his death. He took in all the papers, and had musical instruments lying about—he himself twanged Don-like the guitar—that his customers might divert themselves while awaiting their turns. His master had given him a lot of rubbish, for which his own house had no more room, as well as duplicates of curiosities of real value in the Museum in Bloomsbury. To these he added others of his own invention: the inevitable bit of the Holy Cross, the pillar to which Jesus was tied when scourged, a necklace of Job’s tears; and, as the little barber rhymed in his advertisements in 1723, just after De Foe had set the town talking with his new book— “Monsters of all sorts here are seen, Strange things in Nature as they grew so; Some relics of the Sheba Queen, And fragments of the famed Bob Crusoe.” So that “my eye was diverted by ten thousand gimcracks on the walls and ceiling,” as Steele puts it in the _Tatler_, describing a Voyage to Chelsea. For Don Saltero’s museum, barber’s shop, reading-room, coffee-house had become quite the vogue, and a favourite lounge for men of quality. Old St. Evremond was probably among the first to be shaved here; Richard Cromwell used to come often and sit silently—“a little, and very neat old man, with a most placid countenance, the effect of his innocent and unambitious life.” Steele and Addison and their friends were frequent visitors “to the Coffee House where the Literati sit in council.” And there came here one day about 1724 or 1725, a young man of eighteen or twenty years, out for a holiday from the printing-press at which he worked in Bartholomew Close—Benjamin Franklin by name, recently arrived from the loyal Colonies of North America, and lodging in Little Britain. He had brought with him to London a purse of asbestos, which Sir Hans Sloane, hearing of, bought at a handsome price, and added to his museum. To this museum he gave the young printer an invitation, and probably told him about Don Saltero’s. It was on Franklin’s return from there—the party went by river, of course—that he undressed and leapt into the water, and, as he wrote in his letters, “swam from near Chelsea the whole way to Blackfriars Bridge, exhibiting during the course a variety of feats of activity and address, both upon the surface of the water, as well as under it. This sight occasioned much astonishment and pleasure to those to whom it was new.” [Picture: Don Saltero’s]