This was the scene of the Fleet marriages. Pennant tells how in his youth he had often been tempted by the question ‘Sir, will you please to walk in and be married?’ and he tells us that a painted sign of a male and female, hands conjoined, with the inscription ‘Marriages performed here,’ was hung on the walls of the building. A dirty fellow invited you in, and the parson, a squalid, profligate figure, ‘clad in a tattered plaid nightgown, with a fiery face,’ stood just within, ‘ready to couple you for a dram of gin or roll of tobacco.’ This state of things was not put an end to till 1753. But the Fleet prison has a history of its own, and lies outside the Hampstead story of the river. To return to the water-supply. The ponds in the valley between the sister hills, as Thomson calls the acclivities of Hampstead and Highgate, have often proved dangerous to children and others, from the sudden shelving of their banks. Suicides, too, lured by the lonely quiet of these silent pools, have sometimes sought oblivion in them; but, as a rule, anglers and naturalists are their more persistent visitors, and they may generally be trusted. One specially dangerous is that at the back of the tavern in the Vale of Health, on which the swans make so pleasing an appearance, and children are likely to approach too near the margin in their eagerness to feed them. The town of Hampstead, till quite recent times, was supplied from the well in Shepherd’s Fields, where a conduit had existed in very early times, the water of which is said to have been remarkably sweet and soft. This well was mentioned in the last Act relating to the conduits in the time of Henry VIII. CHAPTER XV. _THE WELL WALK—THE EARLY PERIOD._ Every period has produced some specific or other for ‘the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to,’ and during the latter part of the eighteenth century, and the early years of the present, mineral waters were the fashionable panacea. From traditional times the curative properties of the spring in Well Walk had been known to the inhabitants of Hampstead and the neighbourhood. It oozed out of the green hillside to the east of the village into a self-made pool, whose surface was covered with a rust-coloured film that disclosed its ferruginous nature. But something more than a mere local reputation must have suggested to the Hon. Susannah Noel the gift of the ‘medicinal spring, together with six acres of heathland lying about and encompassing it,’ for the sole use and benefit of the poor of Hampstead for ever. The indenture by which this gift is made on her own part and that of her infant son, Baptist, Earl of Gainsborough, is dated December, 1698, and is the foundation of what is known as the Wells Charity.