all the prizes were given in money; though, too, the road from Chatham to Gadshill was like a fair all day, and the crowd consisted mainly of rough labouring men, of soldiers, sailors, and navvies, there was no disorder, not a flag, rope, or stake displaced, and no drunkenness whatever. As striking a tribute, if rightly considered, as ever was exacted by a strong and winning personality! One of those oddities in which Dickens delighted was elicited by a hurdle race for strangers. The man who came in second ran 120 yards and leaped over ten hurdles with a pipe in his mouth and smoking it all the time. "If it hadn't been for your pipe," said the Master of Gadshill Place, clapping him on the shoulder at the winning-post, "you would have been first." "I beg your pardon, sir," he answered, "but if it hadn't been for my pipe, I should have been nowhere."

To the hospitable hearth of Gadshill Place were drawn, by the fame of the "Inimitable Boz", a long succession of brilliant men and women, mostly of the Anglo-Saxon race, whether English or American; and if not in the throngs for which at Abbotsford open house was kept, yet with a frequency which would have made literary work almost impossible for the host without remarkable steadiness of purpose and regularity of habits. For Longfellow and his daughters he "turned out", that they might see all of the surrounding country which could be seen in a short stay, "a couple of postilions in the old red jackets of the old red royal Dover road, and it was like a holiday ride in England fifty years ago".

In his study in the late and early months, and his Swiss chalet through the summer, Dickens would write such novels as Great Expectations, and the unfinished Mystery of Edwin Drood, taking his local colour from spots which lay within the compass of a reasonable walk; and others, such as A Tale of Two Cities and Our Mutual Friend, to which the circumstances of time and place furnished little or nothing except their influence on his mood. Some of the occasional papers which, in the character of "The Uncommercial Traveller", he furnished to All the Year Round, have as much of the genius loci as any of his romances. Even to-day the rushing swarm of motor cars has not yet driven from the more secluded nooks of Kent all such idylls of open-air vagabondage as this:—

The Kentish road that Dickens thus describes is certainly the Dover Road at Gadshill, from which, of course, there is a steep declivity whether the route is westward to Gravesend or eastwards to Strood and Rochester. In Strood itself Dickens found little to interest him, though the view of Rochester from Strood Hill is an arresting one, with the stately mediævalism of Castle and Cathedral emerging from a kind of haze in which it is hard to distinguish what is smoke-wreath and what a mass of crowding roofs. The Medway, which divides Strood from the almost indistinguishably overlapping towns of Rochester, Chatham, and Brompton, is crossed by an iron bridge, superseding the old stone structure commemorated in Pickwick. Mr. Pickwick's notes on "the four towns" do not require very much modification to apply to their present state.

ROCHESTER FROM STROOD

This description is much less true of Rochester than of its three neighbours, and does no justice to the aspects which Dickens himself presented in the Market Town of Great Expectations, and the Cloisterham of Edwin Drood. Amid the rather sordid encroachments of a modern industrialism, Rochester still keeps something of the air of an old-world country town, and in the precincts of its Cathedral there still broods a cloistral peace. The dominating feature of the town, from whatever side approached, is the massive ruin of the Norman Keep of Bishop Gundulf, the architect also of London's White Tower. Though the blue sky is its only roof, and on the rugged staircase the dark apertures in the walls, where rafters and floors were once, show like gaping sockets from which the ravens and daws have picked out the eyes, it seems to stand with all the immovable strength of some solid rock on which the waves of rebellion or invasion would have dashed and broken. It is easy to believe the saying of Lambarde, in his Perambulation of Kent, that "from time to time it had a part in almost every tragedie". But the grimness of its grey walls is relieved by a green mantle of clinging ivy, and though it can no longer be said of the Castle that it is "bathed, though in ruins, with a flush of flowers", the beautiful single pink grows wild on its ramparts.

From the Castle to the "Bull" in the High Street is a transition which seems almost an anachronism. It is but to follow in the traces of the Pickwick Club. The covered gateway, the staircase almost wide enough for a coach and four, the ballroom on the first floor landing, with card-room adjoining, and the bedroom which Mr. Winkle occupied inside Mr. Tupman's—all are there, just as when the club entertained Alfred Jingle to a dinner of soles, a broiled fowl and mushrooms, and Mr. Tupman took him to the ball in Mr. Winkle's coat, borrowed without leave, and Dr. Slammer of the 97th sent his challenge next morning to the owner of the coat. The Guildhall, with its gilt ship for a vane, and its old brick front, supported by Doric stone columns, is not so memorable because Hogarth played hop-scotch in the colonnade during his Five Days' Peregrination by Land and Water, as for the day when Pumblechook bundled Pip off to be bound apprentice to Jo before the Justices in the Hall, "a queer place, with higher pews in it than a church ... and with some shining black portraits on the walls". This was the Town Hall, too, which Dickens has told us that he had set up in his childish mind "as the model on which the genie of the lamp built the palace for Aladdin", only to return and recognize with saddened, grown-up eyes—exaggerating the