Page:The Life of William Morris.djvu/446

ÆT. 48] water wheel and supplying water of the special quality required for madder-dyeing. This was one of the prime requisites, and limited the choice of sites materially. "We brought away bottles of water for analysis," Mr. De Morgan says in describing the various searches after the desired factory, "to make sure that it was fit to dye with. I recollect Morris's delight when a certificate was sent from an eminent analyst to the effect that a sample taken from pipes supplying all Lambeth was totally unfit for consumption and could only result in prompt zymotic disease: 'There's your science for you, De Morgan!' said Morris. I explained that if the analyst had known that 250,000 people drank the water daily he would have analyzed it different. This was in Battersea and never came to anything."

The works stood on about seven acres of ground, including a large meadow as well as an orchard and vegetable garden. They were old-fashioned, though still in good repair. The riverside and the mill pond are thickly set with willows and large poplars; behind the dwelling-house a flower garden, then neglected, but soon restored to beauty when it came into Morris's hands, runs down to the water. The workshops, for the most part long wooden two-storied sheds, red-tiled and weather-boarded, are grouped irregularly round the mill lade. Beyond the meadow are the remains of a mediæval wall, the sole remaining fragment of Merton Abbey. Within a stone's throw Nelson had lived with the Hamiltons for the two years which followed the peace of Amiens, until he went out to the Mediterranean as Commander-in-Chief in 1803. But his house had been pulled down many years before. One drawback to the place was its extreme inaccessibility, considering the smallness of the distance, from