hich
they receive from no one else. But when I drove into the stable-yard,
Linda (the St. Bernard) was greatly excited; weeping profusely, and
throwing herself on her back that she might caress my foot with her
great fore-paws. Mary's little dog too, Mrs. Bouncer, barked in the
greatest agitation on being called down and asked by Mary, 'Who is
this?' and tore round and round me like the dog in the Faust outlines."
The father and mother and their two sons, four formidable-looking
companions, were with him generally in his later walks.

Round Cobham, skirting the park and village and passing the Leather
Bottle famous in the page of _Pickwick_, was a favourite walk with
Dickens. By Rochester and the Medway, to the Chatham Lines, was another.
He would turn out of Rochester High-street through The Vines (where some
old buildings, from one of which called Restoration-house he took
Satis-house for _Great Expectations_, had a curious attraction for him),
would pass round by Fort Pitt, and coming back by Frindsbury would bring
himself by some cross fields again into the high road. Or, taking the
other side, he would walk through the marshes to Gravesend, return by
Chalk church, and stop always to have greeting with a comical old monk
who for some incomprehensible reason sits carved in stone, cross-legged
with a jovial pot, over the porch of that sacred edifice. To another
drearier churchyard, itself forming part of the marshes beyond the
Medway, he often took friends to show them the dozen small tombstones of
various sizes adapted to the respective ages of a dozen small children
of one family which he made part of his story of _Great Expectations_,
though, with the reserves always necessary in copying nature not to
overstep her modesty by copying too closely, he makes the number that
appalled little Pip not more than half the reality. About the whole of
this Cooling churchyard, indeed, and the neighbouring castle ruins,
there was a weird strangeness that made it one of his attractive walks
in the late year or winter, when from Higham he could get to it across
country over the stubble fields; and, for a shorter summer walk, he was
not less fond of going round the village of Shorne, and sitting on a hot
afternoon in its pretty shaded churchyard. But on the whole, though
Maidstone had also much that attracted him to its neighbourhood, the
Cobham neighbourhood was certainly that which he had greatest pleasure
in; and he would have t