mous picture
of "The Empty Chair". In summer, however, Dickens used to do his work
not in the library but in a Swiss chalet, presented to him by Fechter,
the great actor, which stood in a shrubbery lying on the other side of
the highroad, and entered by a subway that Dickens had excavated for the
purpose. The chalet now must be sought in the terrace garden of Cobham
Hall. When Dickens sat at his desk in a room of the chalet, "up among
the branches of the trees", the five mirrors which he had put in
reflected "the leaves quivering at the windows, and the great fields of
waving corn, and the sail-dotted river". The birds and butterflies flew
in and out, the green branches shot in at the open windows, and the
lights and shadows of the clouds and the scent of flowers and of
everything growing for miles had the same free access. No imaginative
artist, whether in words or colour, could have desired a more inspiring
environment. The back of the house, looking southward, descends by one
flight of steps upon a lawn, where one of the balustrades of the old
Rochester Bridge had, when this was demolished, been fitted up as a
sundial. The lawn, in turn, communicates with flower and vegetable
gardens by another flight of steps. Beyond is "the much-coveted meadow"
which Dickens obtained, partly by exchange, from the trustees--not of
Watts's Charity, as Forster has stated, but of Sir Joseph Williamson's
Free School at Rochester. It was in this field that the villagers from
neighbouring Higham played cricket matches, and that, just before
Dickens went to America for the last time, he held those quaint
footraces for all and sundry, described in one of his letters to
Forster. Though the landlord of the Falstaff, from over the way, was
allowed to erect a drinking booth, and 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, c