Most of the houses at Isleworth are old brick structures, with heavily sashed windows, and the humbler houses and cottages are very much out of repair. There is a look of the passive mood and of the past tense about the place, and you expect (and probably would find if you inquired) holes in the stockings of every other inhabitant, patches on their posteriors, and mere apologies for soles on their footgear; while shocking bad hats are the only wear. The artist who knows what’s what will already have perceived that Isleworth is a place likely to have pictorial qualities, and in his supposition he will be quite correct. It would certainly have captivated Whistler. Imagine the parish church on the river-bank, at the end of this rather feckless street of houses; imagine a very large old inn, the London Apprentice, almost dabbling in the water, and then conceive two large islands, or eyots, or aits, as they may with equal correctitude be called, off-shore, dividing the stream of Thames in two. They are extremely interesting eyots, for they grow to this day abundance of osiers, whose periodical harvesting, for the making of baskets, is a by no means negligible local industry. Lately I walked through Isleworth on the day before Christmas, and there, stepping down between two rows of little tenements forming Tolson’s Almhouses, and looking down upon the river from the railed wall at the farther end, could be seen lying six or eight great barges that had come, not from foreign climes, but from the creeks and ports of the Essex and the Kentish coasts, from the Swale, the Medway, the Blackwater, or the Crouch. Each and all of them had at their mastheads a bundle of holly fastened to a spar, in honour of the coming Day. Beyond them rose the ivy-clad tower of the church, and an occasional pallid gleam of sunshine broke upon the river. It was a pretty and a touching scene. A great deal of very unreliable and really unveracious “history” has been written about the inn, the London Apprentice, said to have been a favourite haunt of highwaymen, among whom our ubiquitous old friend, Dick Turpin, of course figures; but we may disregard such tales. It was once, however, a favourite resort for water-parties from London. The tower of the church is a really beautiful and sturdy pinnacled stone Gothic building, but the body of the church was rebuilt in 1705, from designs left, so it is said, by Sir Christopher Wren; and it is, within and without, typical of the style then prevalent: that well-known type of exterior of red brick, pierced with tall, factory-like windows, and an interior modelled after a “classic” type, with galleries, and painted and gilded more like a place of amusement than a place of worship. A few much-worn brasses remain from an older building, notably one to Margaret Dely, a Sister of Sion during the brief revival of the Abbey under Queen Mary. [Illustration: THE DOCK AT ISLEWORTH.] [Illustration: THE “LONDON APPRENTICE,” ISLEWORTH.]