When peace was proclaimed, these were deposited in the church, where they remained, a trophy of the patriotic spirit that had animated the men of Hampstead. In later times, when the wisdom of being always prepared for such defence made itself felt throughout the length and breadth of the land, the Episcopal Chapel in Well Walk was converted into a drill-room for the volunteers who fell into rank in the place of their forefathers. The old colours were now borne from the church, and escorted with full military honours to the drill-room,[35] where they remained till the building was taken down, when with similar ceremony they were deposited in the new drill-hall, Heath Street. One of the most pathetic incidents in connection with Hampstead Heath is the remembrance of Charles Lamb and his sister which Talfourd has left us, ‘mournfully crossing it hand-in-hand, and going on sadly through the quiet fields to the retreat at Finchley, where the poor sufferer sought shelter from herself ... whence, after a time, she would return in her right mind ... a gentle, amiable woman, beloved by all who knew her,’ but most of all by her brother, whose young manhood was in a measure blighted by the tragedy of which she who enacted it was wholly unconscious. He might be said to have devoted himself to her, and in life they were never parted. Few even of their contemporaries knew the particulars of that household tragedy; the reporters of the inquest, with a respectful pity rare in their craft, withheld the names; and compassion was universally felt for the naturally inoffensive and all-unconscious perpetrator of it, and for him, the dutiful son and loving brother, whose affectionate and sensitive nature suffered in silence the double horror and the double grief. This is how the ‘Annual Register’ tells the melancholy tale (September 23, 1796): ‘On the afternoon of this day a coroner’s jury sat on the body of a lady in the neighbourhood of Holborn, who died in consequence of a wound from her daughter the preceding day.... While they were preparing for dinner, the young lady, in a fit of insanity, seized a case-knife from the table, and in a menacing way pursued a little girl round the room. On the eager cry of her infirm mother to forbear, she renounced her object, and turned with loud shrieks upon her parent. The little girl by her cries brought up the landlady, but too late—the mother was lifeless in her chair, stabbed to the heart, her daughter still wildly standing over her with the knife, and the venerable old man, her father, weeping by her side, himself bleeding from a blow on the forehead from one of the forks she was throwing distractedly about.’