circumstance that no doubt in after years
inspired the _Child's Dream of a Star_ already referred to. When the
family removed to London, Mary Weller was pressed to accompany them, but
was not in a position to accept the offer, in consequence of her promise
to marry Mr. Thomas Gibson, a shipwright of the Chatham Dockyard, with
whom she lived happily until his death, in 1886, at the age of
eighty-two.

Mrs. Gibson modestly declined, on her son Robert's suggestion, to seek
an introduction to Charles Dickens, when he read some of his works at
the old Mechanics' Institute at Chatham, fearing that he had forgotten
her. It is certain, however, that, from the reproduction of her name as
the pretty housemaid at Mr. Nupkins's at Ipswich, and from the extract
from the letter above referred to, she had a kindly place in his
recollections.

Poor David Copperfield, on his way to his aunt's at Dover, stopped at
Chatham--"footsore and tired," he says, "and eating bread that I had
bought for supper." He is afraid "because of the vicious looks of the
trampers;" and even if he could have spared the few pence he possessed
for a bed at the "one or two little houses" with the notice "lodgings
for travellers," he would have hardly cared to go in, on account of the
company he would have been thrown into. And so he says, "I sought no
shelter, therefore, but the sky; and toiling into Chatham--which, in
that night's aspect, is a mere dream of chalk, and draw-bridges, and
mastless ships in a muddy river, roofed like Noah's arks,--crept, at
last, upon a sort of grass-grown battery overhanging a lane, where a
sentry was walking to and fro. Here" [he continues] "I lay down near a
cannon; and, happy in the society of the sentry's footsteps, . . . slept
soundly until morning." Of course it is not possible for us to identify
this spot. "Very stiff and sore of foot," he says, "I was in the
morning, and quite dazed by the beating of drums and marching of troops,
which seemed to hem me in on every side when I went down towards the
long narrow street." However, he has to reserve his strength for getting
to his journey's end, and to this effect he resolves upon selling his
jacket.

There are plenty of marine-store dealers at Chatham, whom we notice on
our tramp, but none of them would, we believe, now answer to the
description of "an ugly old man, with the lower part of his face all
covered with a stubbly grey beard, in a filthy flannel waistcoat, and
sm