lapping 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:--

"I have my eyes upon a piece of Kentish road, bordered on either
side by a wood, and having on one hand, between the road dust and
the trees, a skirting patch of grass. Wild flowers grow in
abundance on this spot, and it lies high and airy, with a distant
river stealing steadily away to the ocean, like a man's life. To
gain the milestone here, which the moss, primroses, violets,
bluebells and wild roses would soon render illegible but for
peering travellers pushing them aside with their sticks, you must
come up a steep hill, come which way you may. So, all the tramps
with carts or caravans--the gipsy tramp, the show tramp, the Cheap
Jack--find it impossible to resist the temptations of the place,
and all turn the horse