AND SO WE come to the boundary of Chelsea on the east, for at Sloane Square (and strictly speaking in a corner house, half of which stands in the parish and half outside) the “bounds” used to be “beaten,” and a young boy received a birching which was supposed to write the exact line of parish demarcation on his memory, for transmission to the next generation. I suppose he was adequately rewarded, and I never heard that the assault was made a cause for complaint. Whether a Chelsea boy of to-day would still suffer it, is questionable.

Old Chelsea, with its queer ways and its originality in thought and action, is fading day by day. The Bun-house has gone from Union Street, and Box Farm from King’s Road. Who thinks of the “callous murder of an Oriental” when they cut through Turk’s Row? Even the Duke of York’s School, founded in 1801, has carried its little “sons of the brave” off to Dover, where we hope they still say, as they ought, “God bless the Regent and the Duke of York!” but where the object-lesson of the Royal Hospital will not be a part of their education, as it was in Chelsea.

And with these changes thick and fast upon us, can you, O stranger, cousin from America, or brother from Greater Britain overseas, wonder that we of the old village by the river cling fast to our legends and traditions of the past, setting them, childish as some may deem them, in that Light of Romance “that never was on sea or land.” How it gilds the simplest deed, lights up the dimmest corner; how it shows certain figures of the past, more real to us than any neighbours of to-day!

Here in a Chelsea backwater where the children have spread a “grotto,” and cry for your “remembrance” of the Holy Sepulchre that they symbolise so unwitting, we too may realise that we have been on pilgrimage back to Tudor days, and the stately times of great Elizabeth, and the Court of merry Charles.

And if the Road-book has served you, as an afternoon’s guide, to make you love and see Chelsea, then, by my halidom! two of us are well pleased!