Going, one foggy night of that winter, perhaps from that Ashburnham House of which we have seen the site, he lost his way, slipped, and fell into the river; and would have been lost, good swimmer though he was, unable to see the shore, but that he heard this church clock strike nine, and so guided, swam safely toward it. He gave to the church, just then being rebuilt with Lady Cheyne’s funds, this bell, with a sum sufficient to have it rung for five minutes every night at nine. So was done for many years—the ringer receiving “a penny each night and a penny for his candle”—until about half a century ago the fund vanished, somehow, somewhere; and this bell has never been rung since! Outside, the tiny graveyard is crowded with slabs and monuments, many of them ugly, some curious, a few fine: from the stately stone tomb of Sir Hans Sloane and his wife—a marble urn entwisted with Æsculapian serpents, under a marble canopy—to the simple slab, worn with wind and weather, of Dr. Chamberlayne and his family; of whom the daughter, Anne, more famous than any of the others, “long declining wedlock, and aspiring above her sex and age, fought under her brother with arms and manly attire, in a fire-ship against the French, on the 30th June, 1690: a maiden heroine!” This “Casta Virago” was then but twenty-three, and did not grow in courage with her years; for she soon after consented to marry one John Spraggs, and then died! Here and there, amid unknown graves, we may find those of Magdalen Herbert; Mrs. Fletcher, wife of the Bishop of London, mother of the Fletcher of the famous firm “Beaumont and Fletcher”; Shadwell, the poet-laureate; Woodfall, the publisher of “Junius”; Sir John Fielding, the blind magistrate of Bow Street, half-brother of the novelist.