In the summer there was the grass-boat, owned by an old man and his wife and a grown-up daughter. It had been an old ship’s jolly-boat, and had a roughly-built half deck cabin about the size of a four-wheeled cab. The three of them lived in it, and came twice a week to the draw-dock with bundles of coarse rush grass cut in the marshes on the river’s bank, to sell to the local tradesmen to feed their horses, at three half-pence a bundle; and all they had left was taken by the cowkeepers at a penny a bundle. When there was no grass they would go sand-dredging, getting the sand by a pole with a leather bag on an iron frame at the end, with a rope to a block rigged up and attached to a windlass. The old man would let down gradually the pole, and the wife and daughter would wind it up. They were a terribly drunken lot; but the temptation to drink in those days in Chelsea was very much greater than at present, for since I can recollect, in that one road not much over a mile, from Battersea Bridge to Ebury Bridge on the canal, there have been eighteen public houses closed, and only one new license granted, and that is to the “Chelsea Pensioner.” The names of the thirteen houses that I alluded to were the “Green Man” at the bottom of Beaufort Street, at the back of Luke Flood’s house, the “Adam and Eve,” the “Cricketers,” the “Magpie and Stump,” the “Don Saltero,” the “Yorkshire Grey,” the “King’s Head,” the “Old Swan,” the “Fox and Hounds,” the “Snow Shoes,” the “General Elliott,” the “Duke of York” (that was the house in Wilkie’s picture of the reading of the news of the Battle of Waterloo), the “Rose and Crown,” the “Cheshire Cheese,” the “Nell Gwynn,” the “Marquess of Granby,” and the “Waterworks,” and several beerhouses. All of these houses have been closed or pulled down. At the corner of Smith Street was the house where Tommy Faulkner, who wrote the history of Chelsea, carried on his business of bookseller, library keeper, stationer and printer. There were some rich people at that end of Paradise Row, several of them Quaker families, keeping two or three servants. Near the corner of the alley leading into Durham Mews, lived a doctor, a celebrated anatomist, and at the bottom of his garden in the Mews stood a building with no window that could be seen. That had the reputation of being the dissecting room. None of us boys would pass it after dark, as it was reported that the body snatchers who robbed the grave yards, would bring the bodies in a sack to sell to the doctor. The present Children’s Hospital was Miss Pemberton’s ladies’ school, Gough House, with a lozenge-shaped grass plot and a carriage drive; an avenue of elm trees led on each side to the house from the iron entrance gates, by the side of which stood the coachhouse and stables.