Long residence in Chelsea had made William De Morgan familiar with its chief landmarks and leading inhabitants. He had known Carlyle and Rossetti, Whistler and William Bell Scott, John Hungerford Pollen and many other celebrities of past days. The historic monuments in the Old Church, and the families whom they commemorate, the Cheynes and Petitts, the Laurences and Danvers, were a theme of which he was never tired. He mourned over the destruction of the old wooden Battersea bridge that figured so often in Whistler’s paintings and etchings. He had many stories to tell of the part which it had played in the old life of Chelsea, and of the health-giving properties associated with the structure in the minds of former inhabitants. There was, it appears, a popular superstition among Chelsea folk some fifty years ago that seven currents of air met in the middle span of the bridge. A carpenter who is still living vividly remembers being taken by his mother to stand on the bridge, on a bitterly cold March day, with his six brothers and sisters, who were all suffering from whooping-cough. It must have been a case of kill or cure, but in this instance the good woman’s faith seems to have been justified, for all her seven children got over the whooping-cough and grew up hale and hearty. In spite, however, of his affection for Chelsea and its people, De Morgan never forgot Italy and the Florentine home where he and his wife had spent so many happy seasons. He missed the sun and the flowers and thought with regret of his friend Spencer Stanhope, whose death had left so great a blank in the English colony at Florence. Often he recalled the painter’s lovely home at Villa Nuti, where the De Morgans always spent the week-end, and their pleasant walks up the steep hillside, on radiant April mornings, when Val d’Arno lay below in the first flush of spring loveliness. One evening towards dusk I happened to meet him in Chelsea, in front of a new Roman church which has been built of recent years in Cheyne Row. The door stood open and we saw the priest within reciting the office of Benediction, the clouds of incense rising heavenwards and the gleam of silver and lighted candles on the altar. ‘Ah!’ he said, ‘I like that, it makes me feel I am at home again!’ And then it flashed across him that this church stood on the exact spot where his first pottery kiln had been set up, in the garden of Orange House; and so, as he said, ‘it really was his home.’