sketch-book.

Afternoon Tea.

‘He’s drawrin!’ she called to her mother, in a loud stage whisper.

The latter bade her mind her manners. But she still continued her observations.

‘Oh, mother, it’s the church!’ was her next cry.

‘Which, I’m sure, it’s a werry decent church,’ the mother declared, as if to encourage us with her approval; and then they went their way.

Later, when, as we were coasting down a hill, we overtook the party, the same child jumped and clapped her hands, ‘It’s goin’ all by its lone self!’ she screamed; but her sister trudged stolidly on, and spake never a word.

Of the many places on the road to Canterbury, made famous by latter-day pilgrims, few are better known and loved than Gad’s Hill, where honest Jack Falstaff performed his deeds of valour, and where Charles Dickens spent the last years of his life. We had counted upon making it, too, a station by the way. But whether it was that we were just then drifting along in lotus-eaters’ fashion, our feet moving mechanically, or whether the prospect of another long coast made us forgetful of all else, certain it is that, with a glance of admiration at the dark spreading cedars, and another at the inn and its sign, adorned with the picture of Falstaff, we went by without a thought as to where we were. At the foot of the hill a baker told us that up yonder was the house where Mr. Dickens had lived. Were we already in danger of forgetting the aim of our pilgrimage? Would we sacrifice our great end for what we had intended to be but a means to it? ‘Let us,’ I said humbly, ‘try to keep our wits from wool-gathering again, lest we ride through Rochester and Canterbury without knowing it!’ We collected our thoughts in good time; for, lo! as mine host said to the monk, Rochester stands there hard by. Before many minutes we saw in the distance the town of Strood, and beyond it the broad Medway and Rochester, its castle and cathedral towering above the houses clustering about them.

We stayed all night in Rochester. The early pilgrims went to the ‘Crown.’ But the ‘Crown,’ alas! stands no longer, and so we slept at the ‘Queen’s Head,’ the C. T. C. headquarters. There is, somewhere in the city, the chapel where pious travellers of old stopped to pray, but we could not find it. The further we went the more it seemed as if we were in pursuit of a shadow. And, indeed, it was here that we discovered that even the road we had ridden over was not that along which mine host and his company had passed as they told their tales. There was no use, however, in our going back to London and starting out again, so as to take the right road; for, alas! it—that is, as far as Rochester—has gone the way of the Tabard and Crown. Only the yew-trees, planted at intervals along its course, survive to show where it once ran.

After we had had our tea, we walked out in the twilight. The town deserves the name of Dulborough, given it by Dickens; and so, indeed, our little maid at the inn thought. There was nothing to do to amuse one’s self, she said. She had been up to London for a month in the spring, and since then she couldn’t abide Rochester.

Having produced a Castle and ruined it, and a Cathedral and restored it, it has ever since rested on its laurels. We wandered a little way through the narrow twisting street, meeting only soldiers and a few young girls and men, and through the gabled gatehouse, where opium-eating Jasper lived; past the wonderful Norman doorway of the Cathedral and then to the Castle, where we rested awhile in the public garden the city has made around it. The pigeons had gone to roost, two or three women sat silently on the benches, a group of children played a singing game in the Pavilion. Away in the west, beyond the river, we could see the green and yellow fields and the poplars, radiant in the light of the afterglow; on the horizon, a dark windmill rose above the hillside like a sentinel on duty, and its long arms moved slowly around. It was even more peaceful down by the river: two men were pulling a long outrigger against the tide; a few heavy-laden barges floated up the stream with it. The figures of the men on board were silhouetted in black against the now fading western light. The red sails were furled and the masts slowly fell as the barges neared the bridge; noiselessly and swiftly they disappeared under the black arches. They seemed to carry with them all the sounds of the day; the silence of night came over the place, our voices sank lower, and we walked quietly back to the lonely street and to the Inn.

Second Day

Oh, what a Fall!

Second Day

There was a little more stir in the place the next morning, but it was because it was filled with tramps, who were wisely taking advantage of the early coolness and hurrying on their way. But when we turned off the High Street the town was as still in the glare of day as it had been in the late twilight. The high brick walls of the private gardens might have enclosed dwelling-places of the dead rather than of the living, for not a sound came over them. The little pointed houses might have been sepulchres for all the signs of life they gave. The whole town, instead of one little street, should be called Tranquil Place. It seemed very characteristic that the Cathedral should be closed, and this at the season when the tourist is abroad in the land. It was being cleaned, an old man told us. We looked through the iron railing of the door into the nave, and at the marble floor, and the tall, white, rounded arches. ‘It’s like looking down the throat of Old Time!’ Mr. Grewgious thought when he stood there. At the farther end by the chancel steps a charwoman was at work on bended knees. By her side was one small bucket. Here, truly, was a Liliputian set to do the work of Brobdignag. At that rate it is probable visitors were shut out for many months.

After we had looked at the ‘Bull,’ which still reminds the public by a sign of the good beds enjoyed by Mr. Pickwick and his friends, at the Town Hall where Pip was apprenticed, at the many-gabled, lattice-windowed house in which Rosa Bud bloomed into young ladyhood, and were standing in front of the ‘Six Poor Travellers’’ lodging-place, reading the inscription over the door, and wondering who were the proctors classed with rogues who could not rest within, a benevolent Englishman passing that way fell upon us. He was a worthy fellow-citizen of Richard Watts. Seeing we were strangers, he, without waiting to be asked, bestowed upon us the charity of information.

‘Do you know what a Proctor is, Sir?’ he asked, addressing himself to J., who meekly, as befits one receiving alms, said that he did not. ‘No! Well, then, I will tell you. It is a proc-u-ra-tor,—one who collects