‘I am heartily sorry for your new friend, Mrs. Kelly, who writes in a desponding way to Mrs. Chambers (Lady Betty Germain’s niece) about her health, and talks of going to Spa. This is a melancholy subject, and I hate to be vexed, so I will say no more of it.’ But she does say some more about it in a letter to the Dean from Knowle (or, as she spells it, Knole), July 9, 1733: ‘I hear poor Mrs. Kelly is not near so well as she says; and a gentleman that came from Bristol says she looks dreadfully, and fears that it is all over with her, and that no mortal could know her. So ends youth and beauty!’ And so exit the beautiful Miss Kelly, of whom I find no further traces at Hampstead or elsewhere. Her story, I think, may easily be traced in these few epistolary extracts: ‘That she belonged to the beau monde is evident, or she would not have been received into that “old courtiers’” set,’ as Mrs. Pendarves calls Lady Betty, whose name visitors to Knowle will be familiar with.[245] CHAPTER XVI. _THE WELL WALK—THE SECOND PERIOD._ Although it could not be said that the Wells were ever actually closed till subsequent to 1809, the visits of the head-borough and a _posse_ of constables at unexpected hours had so disarranged the system of play in Well Walk that before 1725 the gaming-tables, and with them the raffling-shops, had disappeared. Defoe, in an early edition of his ‘Tour of Great Britain,’ tells us, in describing the Hampstead Wells, that _besides the Long Room_, where the gentry meet to amuse themselves and play at cards publicly, on Monday evenings, there is an Assembly-room for dancing 60 feet long and 30 feet wide, elegantly decorated. Every gentleman who subscribes a guinea has a ticket for himself and two ladies; to non-subscribers the fee for admission is two and sixpence. Another authority adds that most of the resident gentlemen are subscribers.[246] In these days of incandescent gas and electric light, one shudders at the thought of this handsome sixty-feet-long assembly-room illuminated by chandeliers filled with pyramids of candles, with others in plated or pewter sconces at set distances on the walls. At Almack’s, long afterwards, where only the best wax-lights were tolerated, complaints of the destruction to the ladies’ dresses, and gentlemen’s also, from the dropping of the melted wax upon them, were frequent. I have no doubt the same lamentation was heard at Hampstead, where the method of lighting could scarcely have been as perfect. But if the illumination inside be thought inadequate, what is to be said as to the state of things outside? It was a happy circumstance when a full moon fell due upon an assembly night, and was accordingly set forth in the advertisement. Otherwise a row of lanterns, suspended from tree to tree above the Well Walk, lighted the visitors to the rooms, though these, towards the end of the century, were superseded by ill-smelling and uncertain oil-lamps.