how queer it would be if we were to set up our work there again. By choice, if 'tis to be had, I had rather get hold of some place on the Colne, say about West Drayton: it would take no longer getting down there, or not so long, as I am to Queen Square now."
On the 3rd of March, "W. De M. is all agog about premises and has just heard of some at Hemel Hempstead near St. Albans. Webb and Wardle are going on Saturday to walk up a stream that runs into Thames at Isleworth."
"I went with De Morgan to Crayford on Monday," he writes to Mrs. Morris again a week later; "the whole country about seems much spoiled since we were there; but Crayford itself less than most places. However, it wouldn't do: though the buildings were big and solid and very cheap: for one thing the time of getting there is unconscionable, over an hour—on the whole it wasn't to be thought of. I saw Hall Place once more and it made the stomach in me turn round with desire of an old house."
The place finally chosen was nearer London than any of these. "On Monday," he writes on the 17th of "March, "De M. and I went to look at premises at Merton in Surrey, whereof more hereafter: they seem as if they would do, and if so, and we can get them, then am I for evermore a bird of this world-without-end-for-everlasting hole of a London." The premises were disused print-works, on the high road from London to Epsom, just seven miles from Charing Cross. They had originally been a silk-weaving factory, started early in last century by some of those Huguenot refugees who had settled in large numbers in the neighbouring districts of Wandsworth and Streatham. The river Wandle, clear and beautiful then, and even now but little spoilt, runs through them, turning a
