shop by Hungerford Stairs, having already enforced a
migration to a cheaper and meaner house. In Clover Street (then Clover
Lane) the little Dickens went to a school kept by a Mr. William Giles,
who years afterwards sent to him, when he was halfway through with
_Pickwick_, a silver snuff-box inscribed to the "Inimitable Boz". To the
Mitre Inn, in the Chatham High Street, where Nelson had many times put
up, Dickens was often brought by his father to recite or sing, standing
on a table, for the amusement of parties of friends. He speaks of it in
the "Holly Tree Inn" as

"The inn where friends used to put up, and where we used to go to
see parents, and to have salmon and fowls, and be tipped. It had an
ecclesiastical sign--the 'mitre'--and a bar that seemed to be the
next best thing to a bishopric, it was so snug. I loved the
landlord's youngest daughter to distraction--but let that pass. It
was in this inn that I was cried over by my little rosy sister,
because I had acquired a black eye in a fight."

When the little Charles Dickens was taken away to London inside the
stage-coach Commodore--his kind master on the night before having come
flitting in among the packing-cases to give him Goldsmith's _Bee_ as a
keepsake--he was leaving behind for ever, in the playing-field near
Clover Lane and the grounds of Rochester Castle and the green drives of
Cobham Park, the untroubled dreams of happy childhood. And though he
could not know this, yet, as he sat amongst the damp straw piled up
round him in the inside of the coach, he "consumed his sandwiches in
solitude and dreariness" and thought life sloppier than he had expected
to find it. And in _David Copperfield_ he has thrown back into those
earlier golden days the shadow of his London privations by bringing the
little Copperfield, footsore and tired, toiling towards dusk into
Chatham, "which, in that night's aspect is a mere dream of chalk and
drawbridges and mastless ships in a muddy river, roofed like Noah's
arks". No doubt the terrible old Jew in the marine-stores shop, who
rated and frightened David with his "Oh, my eyes and limbs, what do you
want? Oh, my lungs and liver, what do you want? Oh--goroo,
goroo!"--until the helpless little fellow was obliged to close with an
offer of a few pence instead of half a crown for his waistcoat, is the
portrait of some actual Jew dealer whom, in one of the back streets of
Chatham, the keen eyes of th