The Well Walk then extended some distance, but in a straight line and on level ground. Dean Fisher says the house he visited was at the bottom of the walk, and Constable himself that the one he is writing of was on an eminence. I imagine that it must have stood on the same side of the way as the Long Room, but beyond the walk, on the slope of the rising ground about Christchurch, where at that time of open spaces such a view was possible. I remember an old and respected inhabitant of Hampstead High Street telling me in 1859 that thirty years previous you could see from what he called ‘Perrin’s Corner’ Erith Reach, and the ships sailing up and down the Thames, while the back-windows of his house looked over open fields to Pancras. The house we are in quest of was rented at £52 per annum, and £24 taxes—not an unimportant house in those days—yet when William Howitt wrote his ‘Northern Heights of London’ there was no house in Well Walk possessing such a view as Constable had described; nor could he,[273] though not much more than thirty years had passed since the delightful painter of the ‘Cornfield, a View near Hampstead,’ and the ‘Fir-tree Avenue on the Heath,’ had resided in the vicinity, discover his sometime abode. Here the artist lost his beloved and loving wife, and wrote in his diary under the date of her death, ‘I shall now call Hampstead home.’ Whereabouts, I wonder, stood that elegant group of trees, ashes, elms and oaks, of which he made a study, and that were to be of as much service to him as if he had bought the field in which they grew? But his sketch-books were full of the likenesses of the sylvan beauties of the Heath and its neighbourhood—the beautiful trees that, like the clouds, seemed to ask him to do something like them. Perhaps those in the grounds of Mr. Charles Holford, of which he made a sketch, may still be flourishing. In 1832 he exhibited ‘Sir Richard Steele’s Cottage, Hampstead,’ and the next year finds him lecturing on art in the Assembly Room on Holly Bush Hill. The date of his last lecture before the Literary and Scientific Institution was July 26, 1836. I was told a little story of Constable, recounted by his son to an old gentleman who resided at Hampstead, which exhibits the painstaking genius of the painter. As a boy, he said, he used to sleep in his father’s studio, and one of his earliest recollections was that of being startled by seeing his father enter the room in the middle of the night, very lightly clad, with a candle in one hand and a brush in the other, for the purpose of adding a suddenly conceived idea or additional touch to a picture, before the suggestion should have faded away. After the death of his wife, Constable retained his Hampstead house as an occasional residence. He died in London in 1837, and rejoined his beloved and two of their little ones in the churchyard at Hampstead.