Daniel Waterhouse walked past Mrs. Green's one summer morning in 1670, a minute after Isaac Newton had done so. It had a little garden in the front, with several tables. Daniel went into it and stood for a moment, checking out his lines of sight. Isaac had risen early, sneaked out of his bedchamber, and taken to the streets without eating any breakfast – not unusual for Isaac. Daniel had followed him out the front door of the (rebuilt, and dramatically enlarged) Waterhouse residence; across Lincoln's Inn Fields, where a few fashionable early risers were walking dogs, or huddling in mysterious conferences; and (coincidentally) right past the very place at Drury Lane and Long Acre where those two Frenchmen had died of the Black Death six years earlier, inaugurating the memorable Plague Years. Thence into the dangerous chasm of flying earth and loose paving-stones that was St. Martin's Lane – for John Comstock, Earl of Epsom, acting in his capacity as Commissioner of Sewers, had decreed that this meandering country cow-path must be paved, and made over into a city street – the axis of a whole new London.