d the conviviality of the rival teams, until Mr. Snodgrass's notes
of the evening's transactions faded away into a blur in which there was
an indistinct reference to "broiled bones" and "cold without". The
stately ruins of a Benedictine Abbey, founded by Bishop Gundulf, give to
the town an attraction of a severer kind.

From Town Malling to Cobtree Hall, supposing the double identification
to be correct, should be a walk of not above two miles "through shady
lanes and sequestered footpaths", the delightful scenery of which made
Mr. Pickwick feel regret to arrive in the main street of "Muggleton".
The distance, however, is in fact something more than two miles as the
crow flies. Cobtree Hall is a green-muffled Elizabethan mansion, of red
brick, faced with stone, and looks out over an undulating country of
orchards and hop fields. It has been altered and enlarged since the days
of _Pickwick_, but the kitchen is just such another large, oldfashioned
kitchen as befits the Christmas games and wassail that had been kept up
at Manor Farm, Dingley Dell, "by old Wardle's forefathers from time
immemorial". The dining-room, though modernized, has a massive marble
mantlepiece not unsuited to that "capacious chimney up which you could
have driven one of the new patent cabs, wheels and all", and in which a
blazing fire used to roar every evening, not only when its warmth was
grateful, but for a symbol, as it were, of old Wardle's attachment to
his fireside. This was the kind of antiquity which made the most direct
appeal to Dickens's sentiment and imagination--not a remote and historic
antiquity, but the furthest extent of a living link between the Present
and the Past. In many an old house of Kentish yeoman or squire Dickens
would have seen some such long, dark-panelled room as the best
sitting-room at Manor Farm, with four-branched, massive silver
candlesticks in all sorts of recesses and on all kinds of brackets; with
samplers and worsted landscapes of ancient date on the walls; with a
very old lady in lofty cap and faded silk gown in the chimney corner,
where she had sat on her little stool as a girl more than half a century
before, and with a hearty, rubicund host presiding over a mighty bowl of
wassail, something smaller than an ordinary washhouse copper, in which
the hot apples would "hiss and bubble with a rich look and a jolly sound
that were perfectly irresistible". Or when the carpet was up, the
candles burning brightly, an