Soon after he opened the Wells, Evelyn visited them, as we read in his invaluable diary. "June 11, 1686. I went to see Middleton's receptacle of water[29] and the New Spa Wells, near Islington." The Spring was still known as Sadler's up to 1697 as we find in advertisements in the _Post Boy_ and _Flying Post_ of June, in that year. But the "Musick House" seems to have passed into other hands, for in 1699 it was called "Miles's Musick House." They seem to have had peculiar entertainments here, judging by an account in _Dawk's Protestant Mercury_ of May 24, 1699. "On Tuesday last a fellow at Sadler's Wells, near Islington, after he had dined heartily on a buttock of beef, for the lucre of five guineas, eat a live cock, feathers, guts, and all, with only a plate of oil and vinegar for sawce, and half a pint of brandy to wash it down, and afterwards proffered to lay five guineas more, that he could do the same again in two hours' time." That this was a fact is amply borne out by the testimony of Ned Ward, who managed to see most of what was going on in town, and he thus describes the sight in his rough, but vigorous language. "With much difficulty we crowded upstairs, where we soon got intelligence of the beastly scene in agitation. At last a table was spread with a dirty cloth in the middle of the room, furnished with bread, pepper, oil, and vinegar; but neither knife, plate, fork, or napkin; and when the beholders had conveniently mounted themselves upon one another's shoulders to take a fair view of his Beastlyness's banquet, in comes the lord of the feast, disguised in an Antick's Cap, like a country hangman, attended by a train of Newmarket executioners. When a chair was set, and he had placed himself in sight of the whole assembly, a live Cock was given into the ravenous paws of this ingurgitating monster." In the same year, in his "Walk to Islington," Ward gives a description of the people who frequented this "Musick House." "---- mixed with a vermin trained up for the gallows, As Bullocks[30] and files,[31] housebreakers and padders.[32] With prize fighters, sweetners,[33] and such sort of traders, Informers, thief-takers, deer-stealers, and bullies." It seems to have been kept by Francis Forcer, a musician, about 1725, and the scene at the Wells is graphically described in "The New River, a Poem, by William Garbott."