and the
lips by which, on the following day, the words that had flowed warmly
from the heart were to have been uttered,--those lips were mute in death
within a week.

On the 16th of April, 1765, Mr. James House Knight, of Walham Green,
returning home from London, was robbed and murdered on the highroad in
the vicinity of Little Chelsea; the record of his burial in the parish
register of Kensington is, "Shot in Fulham Road, near Brompton." For the
discovery of the murderers a reward of fifty pounds was offered; and, on
the 7th of July following, two Chelsea pensioners were committed to
prison, charged with this murder, on the testimony of their accomplice,
another Chelsea pensioner, whom they had threatened to kill upon some
quarrel taking place between them. The accused were tried, found guilty,
hanged, and gibbeted; one nearly opposite Walnut-tree Walk, close by the
two-mile stone, the other at Bull Lane, a passage about a quarter of a
mile farther on, which connects the main Fulham Road with the King's
Road, by the side of the Kensington Canal. In these positions, for some
years, the bodies of the murderers hung in chains, to the terror of
benighted travellers and of market-gardeners, who

"Wended their way,
In morning's grey,"

towards Covent Garden, until a drunken frolic caused the removal of a
painful and useless exhibition. A very interesting paper upon London
life in the last century occurs in the second volume of Knight's
'London;' in which it is observed that "a gibbet's tassel" was one of the
first sights which met the eye of a stranger approaching London from the
sea.

"About the middle of the last century, similar objects met the gaze
of the traveller by whatever route he entered the metropolis. '_All_
the gibbets in the Edgware Road,' says an extract from the newspapers
of the day in the 'Annual Register' for 1763, 'on which _many_
malefactors were being hung in chains, were cut down by persons
unknown.' The _all_ and the _many_ of this cool matter-of-fact
announcement conjure up the image of a long avenue planted with
'gallows-trees,' instead of elms and poplars,--an assemblage of
pendent criminals, not exactly 'thick as leaves that strew the brook
in Valombrosa,' but frequent as those whose feet tickling Sancho's
nose, when he essayed to sleep in the cork forest, drove him from
tree to tree in search of an empty bough.

"Frequent ment