number of corn-mills, and even as late as 1810
gave motion to a lead-mill near the turnpike
in the City-road. In its younger days, like
all similar streams, it was spanned by many
bridges throughout its course; and its lower
end was wide enough to allow barges to be
rowed up it as far as Bucklersbury to a spot
now called Barge-yard. This river discharged
into the Thames east of Dowgate Dock. Its
line within the old City wall and ditch, was by
Walbrook, Princes-street, crossing beneath the
Bank and along Bell-alley to London-wall, and
thence out of the City, across Old-street, to its
source. It had several branches. Its bed was
thirty-two feet beneath the present level of
Princes-street, as was discovered when the
London-bridge sewer—its great substitute—
was built, and its waters have trickled under
the foundations of the Bank. Even now, in its
present dark obscurity, it has reason to be proud.
It may consider itself the father of one of the
lustiest young sewers in the metropolis; for the
London-bridge sewer and its neighbour, the
Fleet, are the largest channels of underground
London.

The Fleet itself—the "Turnmill Brook"—
the "River of Wells"—bubbles up in a hundred
volumes. It trickles through poems; forms
little pools in plays; and sparkles, here and
there, in less imaginative pages. Some
historians of the Fleet Brook have regarded it with
more veneration or enthusiasm than others, and
have mused over its probable condition in the
remotest times. They have pictured the period
when Roman villas studded its banks; when
Snow-hill was famous for its snowdrops ; when
Saffron-hill was a wooded slope, like the Thames'
banks at Richmond; and when the stream
wandered down from its source in the Hampstead
Hills, carrying swarms of silver trout into the
Thames. They have dreamed over the time
when large vessels may have floated up as high
as King's-cross, where this black river is now
carried over the underground Metropolitan Railway
in an iron pipe or tunnel.* Some excuse
for this dream about an extinct inland river may
be found in the tradition that an anchor was
found some years ago as high up as the site of
the Elephant and Castle, at Pancras-wash, where
the road branches off to Kentish Town.

* See All the Year Round, January 26th, 1861.

The Fleet Brook has always been celebrated
for its periodical floods in winter. It is the
most unruly sewer in the whole vast property
handed over in trust to the Metropolitan Board
of Works. Last winter it was impassable for
many weeks; and thirty or forty years ago, after
continued rains, or a sudden thaw with much
snow upon the ground, it often overflowed
its bounds, broke up its arches, and flooded the
surrounding neighbourhood. A flood of this
kind is recorded, which took place about 1820,
when several oxen were drowned, and many
butts of beer and other heavy articles were
carried down the stream, from houses on the
banks into which the water had broken. The
greatest flood happened in January, 1809.
The snow was lying very deep, a rapid thaw
came on, and the arches, not affording a sufficient
passage for the increased current or storm
waters, the whole space between Pancras,
Somers Town, and the bottom of the hill at
Pentonville, was covered with water. The flood
rose to the height of three feet in the middle
of the highway; the lower rooms of all the
houses within that space were completely
inundated; and the inhabitants had much of their
goods and furniture damaged which they had
not time to remove. Two cart-horses were
drowned, and persons were obliged to be
conveyed to and from their houses, and to receive
their provisions in at the windows, by means
of carts. Much of the water of the Fleet Brook
—originally drawn from springs on the south
side of the hill between Hampstead and
Highgate, by Ken Wood, where it forms several large
ponds—has been carried off in pipes by the
Hampstead Water Company, now merged in the
New River Company.

That branch of the Fleet Brook down in the
London valley, known by the unsavoury title of
the Fleet Ditch, is even more closely embanked
with anecdote, history, and poetical satire. It
was once supplied with the waters of certain
local wells on each side of its course, such as
Clerken-well, St. Chad's-well, Am-well, Sadler's-
wells, St. Pancras-wells, Bagnigge-wells, and
others. It was also fed by a small brook,
called Old-bourne, the original of Holborn.
"After the great fire," says Mr. Cunningham,
"it was converted into a dock or creek, about
forty feet in breadth, at a cost of about eight-
and-twenty thousand pounds sterling, called the
'New Canal.' It was an unprofitable speculation.
The toll was heavy, the traffic
inconsiderable, and in spite of its new name and the
money that had been spent upon it, the Ditch
was doomed to continue a common sewer."

As early as Ben Jonson's days the Fleet
Ditch was considered a fair object for humorous
satire and description. In the Famous
Voyage—an account of an adventurous journey
up the stream—the following passage occurs:

All was to them the same; they were to pass,
And so they did, from Styx to Acheron
The ever-boiling flood; whose banks upon,
Your Fleet-lane Furies and hot cooks do dwell,
That with still scalding steams make the place Hell;
The sinks run grease, and hair of meazled hogs. . . .
Cats there lay divers.

The Ditch was a nuisance in Cromwell's time,
"by reason of the many encroachments thereupon
made, by keeping of hogs and swine therein
and elsewhere near it." As the New Canal,
with its sides built of stone and brick, its
wharves and landing-places, it still maintained
its repulsive character. Some animals seem to
have fattened in its thick stream, to judge by
the following passage in the Gentleman's Magazine
for 1736:

"A fatter boar was hardly ever seen than one
taken up this day (August 24, 1736), coming
out of Fleet Ditch into the Thames. It proved