loose when they come to it, and boil the
pot. Bless the place, I love the ashes of the vagabond fires that
have scorched its grass!"

The Kentish road that Dickens thus describes is certainly the Dover Road
at Gadshill, from which, of course, there is a steep declivity whether
the route is westward to Gravesend or eastwards to Strood and Rochester.
In Strood itself Dickens found little to interest him, though the view
of Rochester from Strood Hill is an arresting one, with the stately
mediaevalism of Castle and Cathedral emerging from a kind of haze in
which it is hard to distinguish what is smoke-wreath and what a mass of
crowding roofs. The Medway, which divides Strood from the almost
indistinguishably overlapping towns of Rochester, Chatham, and
Brompton, is crossed by an iron bridge, superseding the old stone
structure commemorated in _Pickwick_. Mr. Pickwick's notes on "the four
towns" do not require very much modification to apply to their present
state.

"The principal productions", he wrote, "appear to be soldiers,
sailors, Jews, chalk, shrimps, officers, and dockyard men. The
commodities chiefly exposed for sale in the public streets are
marine stores, hard-bake, apples, flat-fish, and oysters. The
streets present a lively and animated appearance, occasioned
chiefly by the conviviality of the military.... The consumption of
tobacco in these towns must be very great, and the smell which
pervades the streets must be exceedingly delicious to those who are
extremely fond of smoking. A superficial traveller might object to
the dirt, which is their leading characteristic, but to those who
view it as an indication of traffic and commercial prosperity, it
is truly gratifying."

[Illustration: ROCHESTER FROM STROOD]

This description is much less true of Rochester than of its three
neighbours, and does no justice to the aspects which Dickens himself
presented in the Market Town of _Great Expectations_, and the
Cloisterham of _Edwin Drood_. Amid the rather sordid encroachments of a
modern industrialism, Rochester still keeps something of the air of an
old-world country town, and in the precincts of its Cathedral there
still broods a cloistral peace. The dominating feature of the town, from
whatever side approached, is the massive ruin of the Norman Keep of
Bishop Gundulf, the architect also of London's White Tower. Though
the blue sky is its only