Neither do I imagine that the tenements which arose between the date of the advertisement of the letting of the Wells, and that which announces their opening in the summer of the same year (1701) could have been of very solid construction. There was no time for the work that English builders in those days put into the building of brick houses, and everything shows that the preparation for the convenience of visitors to the spa must have been of a hurried, and for the most part of a temporary, nature. Very soon we read of bun-houses and raffling-shops, which appear to have been set up over against the Long Room, from which some years later Steele crossed over to watch the cheating play in one of them. In deference to the religious wants of the visitors, we find the proprietor of the Wells building a chapel at his own expense, of which I shall have more to say farther on. Happily, the most interesting, from its associations, of the Wells buildings, the Long Room, still exists in Weatherall Place, a long, low, white structure when I first knew it, of timber, brick and mortar. It has been used as a private residence for quite a hundred years, and a late proprietor, Mr. Routh, has wholly metamorphosed its appearance by having it cased with red brick. Sion Chapel, which afterwards became notorious in the history of Hampstead, was a much-needed and, for some time, decently conducted place of worship, at which one or other of the many ejected Nonconformist ministers of the time officiated, for even then the ancient chapel of St. Mary (now St. John’s) was almost ruinous, and inadequate to the yearly increasing number of parishioners, and so could afford little, if any, accommodation for strangers. From 1701 to 1712-13, that happy period when, as Dr. Gibbons tells us, the Wells were frequented by ‘as much and as good company as go yearly to Tunbridge Wells, in Kent,’ the searcher of old newspapers will find concerts of vocal and instrumental music, as well as other entertainments, to have been constantly advertised to take place in the Long Room. The prices of admission to the concerts were one shilling in the morning, and (except on extraordinary occasions) sixpence in the evening, when, ‘for the convenience of gentlemen returning to town,’ the concerts commenced at five o’clock. The early hour is suggestive of the then state of the roads in the suburbs of London. At this period a stage-coach started for Hampstead every morning, from the Greyhound in Holborn, and another from the Chequers, returning at night,[234] besides a carrier daily; but in all probability the coachmen preferred driving home by daylight, not only on account of the roughness of the roads, but to avoid running the risk of being stopped by highwaymen on their track, or at the meeting of the ways at the half-way house, the Old Mother Red-Cap, a place noted for waylaying the coaches, probably from the facility of escape which the divergence of three separate roads afforded.