of
Edwin Drood's watch in a corner of the weir, and then, after diving
again and again, of his shirt-pin "sticking in some mud and ooze" at the
bottom. The nearest weir on the Medway is at Allington, seven or eight
miles above Rochester, and Cloisterham Weir was but "full two miles"
away.

Before Allington can be reached, in ascending the Medway, the river is
spanned by an ancient stone bridge, of pointed arches and triangular
buttresses, at Aylesford. The ancient Norman church, and the red roofs
and crowding gables of the picturesque and historic village, are set in
a circle of elm trees, with a background of rising chalk downs beyond.
Those who have investigated with perhaps "an excess"--as Wordsworth
would say--"of scrupulosity" all the details of Pickwickian topography
are inclined to believe that the wooden bridge, upon which the chaise
hired by the Club to make the journey from Rochester to Dingley Dell
came hopelessly to grief, was Aylesford Bridge, transmuted for the nonce
from Kentish ragstone into timber. However that may be, there is a
matter of genuine history which has signalized in no common way this
old-world village. At this ford, the lowest on the Medway, the Jutes
under Hengist and Horsa routed the British in a battle which decided the
predominating strain of race in future Men of Kent and Kentish Men:
natives of Kent, that is, according as they dwell on the right or left
bank of the Medway. A farmhouse with the name of Horsted, at the point
farther back where the Rochester to Maidstone road is joined by the road
from Chatham, stands, it is believed, on the grave of Horsa. And about a
mile and a half north of Aylesford, a grey old cairn, set on a green
sward in the midst of a cornfield, is also closely associated with the
first great victory won by English people on the soil which they were
destined to make their own and distinguish with their name. In his
_Short History of the English People_ J. R. Green says of this
cromlech:--

"It was from a steep knoll on which the grey weather-beaten stones
of this monument are reared that the view of their first
battlefield would break on the English warriors; and a lane which
still leads down from it through peaceful homesteads, would guide
them across the ford which has left its name in the little village
of Aylesford. The Chronicle of the conquering people tells nothing
of the rush that may have carried the ford, or of th