from out the grey mass shines the clock-face, even now striking nine, as it did for the “Hon. William,” just then soused in the river, more than two hundred years ago. Farther beyond the bridge are two buildings, which also bring the old and the new close together; the “World’s End Tavern,” at the end of the passage of that name, famous three centuries ago as a rendezvous for improper pleasure parties, and introduced in Congreve’s “Love for Love,” in that connection. Just west of the sedate little “public,” “The Aquatic Stores,” are two tiny houses set back from the embankment; stone steps lead down to their minute front gardens; vines clamber up the front of the westernmost house to an iron balcony on its roof. That balcony was put there for his own convenience by Joseph Mallord William Turner, the painter; in that house, No. 119, Cheyne Walk, he lived for many years, and in that front room he died, on the 18th December, 1851. To that upper window, no longer able to paint, too feeble to walk, he was wheeled every morning during his last days that he might lose no light of the winter sun on his beloved Thames. In Battersea Church you may sit in the little vestry window wherein he was wont to sketch. The story of his escape from his grand and gloomy mansion in Queen Anne Street, is well known; he never returned to it, but made his home here with the burly Mrs. Booth. After long hunting, his aged housekeeper, in company with another decrepid dame, found him in hiding, only the day before his death. The barber’s son of Maiden Lane lies in the great cathedral of St. Paul’s, and the evil that he did is buried with him—his eccentricity, his madness if you will—but he lives for all time, as the greatest landscape painter England has known. [Picture: The Western End of Cheyne Walk]