His illness increasing on him, he wrote to Margate for Dr. Price, an old acquaintance of his and Mrs. Booth's, and Price, coming up, examined him and told him there was no hope of his recovery. "Go downstairs," he urged the doctor, "take a glass of sherry, and then look at me again." But a second examination only confirmed Dr. Price in his opinion.
It must have been at this juncture that Turner's hiding-place was discovered. His Queen Anne Street housekeeper, Hannah Danby, found a letter left in the pocket of one of his old coats, and this gave the Chelsea address. She went with another woman and made inquiries round about Cheyne Walk till it was clear enough to her that the Mr. Booth to whom that letter was directed was none other than Turner, and acting on her information Mr. Harpur, Turner's executor, journeyed at once to Chelsea, and arrived at 119 Cheyne Walk to find Turner sinking fast. Towards sunset, on that wintry day of his dying, he asked Mrs. Booth to wheel him to the window, and so gazing out on the wonder of the darkening sky he passed quietly away with his head on her shoulder.
A certain John Pye, a Chelsea engraver, afterwards interviewed the owner of No. 119, and learned from him that Turner and Mrs. Booth had, some four or five years before, called and taken the house of him, paying their rent in advance because they objected to giving any names or references. Pye also saw Mrs. Booth, and says she was a woman of fifty, illiterate, but "good-looking and kindly-mannered." Turner had used to call her "old 'un," she said, and she called him "dear"; and she explained that she had first got acquainted with him when, more than twenty years ago, "he became her lodger near the Custom House at Margate." So small was the shabby little house in Cheyne Walk that the undertakers were unable to carry the coffin up the narrow staircase, and had to carry the body down to it. Nowadays, the house has been enlarged; it and the house next door have been thrown into one, otherwise it has undergone little change since Turner knew it.
Whilst Turner was thus passing out of life in Cheyne Walk, Carlyle was dwelling near by at No. 24 (then No. 5) Cheyne Row, and had been resident there for seventeen years. On first coming to London in 1830, he and his wife lodged at 33 Ampton Street, Gray's Inn Road. They spent, he says, "an interesting, cheery, and, in spite of poor arrangements, really pleasant winter" there; they had a "clean and decent pair of rooms," and their landlord's family consisted of "quiet, decent people." He wrote his essay on Dr. Johnson whilst he was here, and was making a fruitless search for a publisher who would accept _Sartor Resartus_, which he had recently completed. Jeffrey called there several times to pass an afternoon with him, and John Stuart Mill was one other of the many visitors who found their way to the drab, unlovely, rather shabby street to chat with the dour, middle-aged Scotch philosopher, who was only just beginning to be heard of.
