the air of the neighboring river was so refreshing, and the quiet of
the "no-thoroughfare" so full of repose, that, although our fortunes
were at their worst, and my health almost of a piece with them, I
felt for some weeks as if I could sit still for ever, embalmed in
the silence. I got to like the very cries in the street for making
me the more aware of it for the contrast. I fancied they were unlike
the cries in other quarters of the suburbs, and that they retained
something of the old quaintness and melodiousness which procured them
the reputation of having been composed by Purcell and others. Nor
is this unlikely, when it is considered how fond those masters were
of sporting with their art, and setting the most trivial words to
music in their glees and catches. The primitive cries of cowslips,
primroses, and hot cross buns, seemed never to have quitted this
sequestered region. They were like daisies in a bit of surviving
field. There was an old seller of fish in particular, whose cry of
"Shrimps as large as prawns," was such a regular, long-drawn, and
truly pleasing melody, that in spite of his hoarse, and I am afraid,
drunken voice, I used to wish for it of an evening, and hail it
when it came. It lasted for some years, then faded, and went out;
I suppose, with the poor old weather-beaten fellow's existence.
This sense of quiet and repose may have been increased by an early
association of Chelsea with something out of the pale; nay, remote.
It may seem strange to hear a man who has crossed the Alps talk of
one suburb as being remote from another. But the sense of distance is
not in space only; it is in difference and discontinuance. A little
back-room in a street in London is further removed from the noise,
than a front room in a country town. In childhood, the farthest local
point which I reached anywhere, provided it was quiet, always seemed
to me a sort of end of the world; and I remembered particularly
feeling this, the only time when I had previously visited Chelsea,