ous by his story of _The Seven Poor
Travellers_, a simple brass records his birth, death, and burial-place,
"To connect his memory with the scenes in which his earliest and his
latest years were passed, and with the associations of Rochester
Cathedral and its neighbourhood which extended over all his life".

[Illustration: RESTORATION HOUSE, ROCHESTER]

In the old cemetery of St. Nicholas' Church, on the north side of the
Cathedral, it was Dickens's desire to be buried, and his family would
have carried out his wishes had it not been that the burial-ground had
been closed for years and no further interments were allowed. On the
south side of the Cathedral is the delightfully oldfashioned terrace
known as Minor Canon Row--Dickens's name for it is Minor Canon
Corner--where the Reverend Septimus Crisparkle kept house with the
"china shepherdess" mother. The "Monks' Vineyard" of _Edwin Drood_
exists as "The Vines". Here under a group of elms called "The Seven
Sisters" Edwin Drood and Rosa sat when they decided to break their
engagement, and opposite "The Seven Sisters" is the "Satis House" of
_Great Expectations_, where the lonely and embittered Miss Havisham
taught Estella the cruel lessons of a ruined life. It is really
Restoration House--Satis House is on the site of the mansion of Master
Richard Watts, to whose apologies for no better entertainment of his
Sovereign, Queen Elizabeth answered "Satis"--and it takes its name from
having received the restored Merry Monarch under its roof on his way to
London and the throne. Pepys, who was terrified by the steepness of the
castle cliff and had no time to stay to service at the Cathedral, when
he had been inspecting the defences at Chatham, found something more to
his mind in a stroll by Restoration House, and into the Cherry Garden,
where he met a silly shopkeeper with a pretty wife, "and did kiss her".

Dickens would often follow this route of Pepys, but in the reverse
direction, that is, through the Vines to Chatham and its lines of
fortification, where Mr. Pickwick, Mr. Winkle, and Mr. Snodgrass became
so hopelessly entangled in the sham fight which they had gone over from
Rochester to see. At No. 11 Ordnance Terrace the little Charles Dickens
lived from 1817 to 1821, and at No. 18 St. Mary's Place from 1821 to
1823, the financial troubles, which eventually drove the family into the
Marshalsea debtors' prison, and Charles himself into the sordid drudgery
of the blacking-