und of white enamel, with a seal
and silk cords in their proper colours, which made known to all and
sundry the purpose for which Lord Cobham--whose granddaughter married,
for one of her five husbands, Sir John Oldcastle, the Lollard
martyr--had erected this castle.

"Knoweth that beth and schul be
That i am mad in help of the cuntre
In knowyng of whych thyng
This is chartre and witnessyng."

No forge stands now on the site of Joe Gargery's smithy, where, as the
hammer rang on the anvil to the refrain--

"Beat it out, beat it out--Old Clem!
With a clink for the stout--Old Clem!
Blow the fire, blow the fire--Old Clem!
Roaring drier, soaring higher--Old Clem!"--

Pip would see visions of Estella's face in the glowing fire or at the
wooden window of the forge, looking in from the darkness of the night,
and flitting away. But though the smithy has gone, the "Three Jolly
Bargemen", where Joe would smoke his pipe by the kitchen fire on a
Saturday night, still survives as the "Three Horseshoes"--the inn to
which the secret-looking man who stirred his rum and water with a file,
brought Magwitch's two one-pound notes for Pip, and the redoubtable
Jaggers, the autocrat of the Old Bailey, with his burly form, great
head, and huge, cross-examining forefinger announced to Pip his Great
Expectations. Down the river in the direction of yonder "distant savage
lair", from which the wind comes rushing, lie those long reaches,
between Kent and Essex, "where the river is broad and solitary, where
the waterside inhabitants are very few, and where lone public-houses are
scattered here and there"--the lonely riverside on which Pip and Herbert
sought a hiding-place for Magwitch until the steamer for Hamburg or the
steamer for Rotterdam could be boarded, as she dropped down the tide
from the Port of London. Whether on the Kent or the Essex side, the cast
of the scenery corresponds with equal closeness to Dickens's
description. Slimy stakes stick out of the mud, and slimy stones stick
out of the mud, and red landmarks and tide-marks stick out of the mud,
and old roofless buildings slip into the mud, and all about is
stagnation and mud! The desolate flat marshes look still more weird by
reason of the tall pollards that lean over them like spectres. Far away
are the rising grounds, between which and the marshes there appears no
sign of life except here and there in the foreground a melancholy gull.
The course wh