It is a far cry from Dick Steele to Charles Lamb, yet the latter too makes mention of the “Don Saltero Tavern” in one of his letters; saying that he had had offered to him, by a fellow clerk in the India House, all the ornaments of its smoking-room, at the time of the auction-sale, when the collection was dispersed. This was in 1807, and the place was then turned into a tavern; its original sign—“Don Saltero’s, 1695,” in gold letters on a green board—swinging between beams in front, until the demolition of the old house only twenty years ago. {125} * * * * * A little farther on, just west of Oakley Street, on the outer edge of the roadway of Cheyne Walk, stood, until within a few months, another old sign, at which I was wont to look in delight, unshamed by the mute mockery of the passing Briton, who wondered what the sentimental prowler could see to attract him in this rusty relic. It stood in front of the little public-house lately burned to the ground—“The Magpie and Stump:” two solid posts carrying a wide cross-piece, all bristling with spikes for the impalement of the climbing boy of the period; “MAGPIE AND STUMP, QUOIT GROUNDS,” in dingy letters on the outer side, once plain for all rowing men to read from the river; above was an iron Magpie on an iron Stump, both decrepid with age, and a rusty old weathercock, too stiff to turn even the letter _E_—alone left of the four points of the compass. Between these posts might still be traced the top stone of an old water-staircase, embedded now in the new-made ground which forms the embankment garden here; just as you might have seen, only the other day, the water-stairs of Whitehall Palace, which have now been carted away. Up this staircase Queen Elizabeth has often stepped, on her frequent visits to the rich and powerful Earl of Shrewsbury, her devoted subject and friend. For, on the river slope, just back of Cheyne Walk here, stood, until the second decade of this century, Shrewsbury House, another one of Chelsea’s grand mansions. It was an irregular brick structure, much gabled, built about a quadrangle; although but one storey in height it was sufficiently spacious, its great room being one hundred and twenty feet in length, wainscotted in finely carved oak, and its oratory painted to resemble marble. In a circular room there was concealed a trap-door, giving entrance to a winding stairway, which led to an underground passage; believed to have opened on the river wall at low tide, and to have twisted inland to the “Black Horse” in Chelsea, and thence to Holland House, Kensington. Local gossip claims that it was used by the Jacobites of 1745, and perhaps of 1715, too; for they made their rendezvous by the river at this tavern, and here drank to their “King over the water.” In the grounds of the “Magpie and Stump” is a wooden trapdoor, through which I once descended by stone steps into a paved