Under these circumstances, leaving the rooms was perilous. Groups of flambeaux in the hands of waiting serving-men and link-boys threw a lurid glow through the foul-smelling smoke that clouded them, and under cover of which cut-purses and pickpockets, amongst them, perhaps, the notorious Jenny Diver herself,[247] were enabled to mix with the company leaving the doors, and relieve them of laced handkerchiefs, fans, purses, snuff-boxes, and jewellery, without detection. Not unfrequently the throng was swelled by a mob of roughs (as we now call them), who, getting up a quarrel for the express purpose of creating confusion, could so cover the retreat of the thieves. This state of things was often recurring in Well Walk, and continued down to quite the end of the eighteenth century. Cradock, quoted by Lord Campbell in his ‘Lives of the Lord Chancellors,’ tells his readers that one evening the Misses Thurlow (there were three of them),[248] being at the Hampstead Assembly, were on returning in some danger from a riot at the door, from which they were rescued by a young officer who happened to be present, and who handed them in safety to their coach. The incident reads like the opening of a Della Cruscan romance; but, alas! the Lord High Chancellor Thurlow had outlived romance, though he made a point of calling the next morning on the young gentleman, whom he found at breakfast, and satisfied his sense of obligation to him by offering to partake of it, which he did. How or when the notorious Sion Chapel was disposed of we learn nothing.[249] Park is silent on the subject. I think it not impossible that on the falling off of visitors to the Wells, and the probable discontinuance of marriages at the chapel, the latter being private property, the owner may have turned it wholly to secular uses, and have converted it into the fine Assembly Room, with the hope of adding a new attraction to the place for the general public. If so, he appears to have wholly failed in his speculation, for, owing to the questionable company who found admittance to it, the resident gentry withdrew their patronage, and held their assemblies in the long room of the Upper Flask. This movement must have destroyed at one stroke the prestige and prosperity of the beautiful Assembly Room, the assured support of which rested with the resident subscribers.