roof, and on the rugged staircase the dark
apertures in the walls, where rafters and floors were once, show like
gaping sockets from which the ravens and daws have picked out the eyes,
it seems to stand with all the immovable strength of some solid rock on
which the waves of rebellion or invasion would have dashed and broken.
It is easy to believe the saying of Lambarde, in his _Perambulation of
Kent_, that "from time to time it had a part in almost every tragedie".
But the grimness of its grey walls is relieved by a green mantle of
clinging ivy, and though it can no longer be said of the Castle that it
is "bathed, though in ruins, with a flush of flowers", the beautiful
single pink grows wild on its ramparts.

From the Castle to the "Bull" in the High Street is a transition which
seems almost an anachronism. It is but to follow in the traces of the
Pickwick Club. The covered gateway, the staircase almost wide enough for
a coach and four, the ballroom on the first floor landing, with
card-room adjoining, and the bedroom which Mr. Winkle occupied inside
Mr. Tupman's--all are there, just as when the club entertained Alfred
Jingle to a dinner of soles, a broiled fowl and mushrooms, and Mr.
Tupman took him to the ball in Mr. Winkle's coat, borrowed without
leave, and Dr. Slammer of the 97th sent his challenge next morning to
the owner of the coat. The Guildhall, with its gilt ship for a vane, and
its old brick front, supported by Doric stone columns, is not so
memorable because Hogarth played hop-scotch in the colonnade during his
_Five Days' Peregrination by Land and Water_, as for the day when
Pumblechook bundled Pip off to be bound apprentice to Jo before the
Justices in the Hall, "a queer place, with higher pews in it than a
church ... and with some shining black portraits on the walls". This was
the Town Hall, too, which Dickens has told us that he had set up in his
childish mind "as the model on which the genie of the lamp built the
palace for Aladdin", only to return and recognize with saddened,
grown-up eyes--exaggerating the depreciation a little, for the sake of
the contrast--"a mere mean little heap of bricks, like a chapel gone
demented". Close by the Guildhall is the Town Clock, "supposed to be the
finest clock in the world", which, alas! "turned out to be as moon-faced
and weak a clock as a man's eyes ever saw".

On the north side of the High Street, not many yards from the Bull, is a
Tudor two-storied, stone