s many expeditions to and fro on the
Dover road, between Rochester and London, and on one of them, riding
outside, has the two convicts, bound for the hulks moored off the
marshes, as fellow passengers on the back seat.

At Canterbury it is not possible to establish the identity of Dr.
Strong's house--"a grave building in a courtyard, with a learned air
about it that seemed very well suited to the stray rooks and jackdaws
who came down from the Cathedral towers, and walked with a clerkly
bearing on the grass plot"--but Canon Benham has asserted his conviction
that Mr. Wickfield's house--where David made the acquaintance of Agnes
and of Uriah Heap--is at the corner of Broad Street and Lady Wotton's
Green, though it is another residence, by the West Gate, which is
represented on the picture postcards.

The Royal Fountain Hotel in St. Margaret's Street (formerly the Watling
Street) is recognized as the County Inn at which Mr. Dick used to sleep
when he went over to Canterbury to visit David Copperfield at Dr.
Strong's school. All the little bills which he contracted there, it will
be remembered, were referred to Miss Trotwood before they were paid; a
circumstance which caused David to think "that Mr. Dick was only
allowed to rattle his money, and not to spend it". A less pretentious
establishment, the "little inn" where Mr. Micawber put up on his first
visit to Canterbury, and "occupied a little room in it partitioned off
from the commercial, and strongly flavoured with tobacco smoke", is
probably the Sun Inn in Sun Street. Here Mr. and Mrs. Micawber
entertained David to "a beautiful little dinner"--

"Quite an elegant dish of fish; the kidney end of a loin of veal
roasted; fried sausage meat; a partridge and a pudding. There was
wine, and there was strong ale; and after dinner Mrs. Micawber made
us a bowl of hot punch with her own hands."

Local tradition at Broadstairs used to point to Fort House, on the cliff
by the Coastguard Station, as the holiday residence at which Dickens
wrote most of _Bleak House_. But though it has been rechristened from
the title of the novel, by an owner who demolished Dickens's summer
home, and built the existing pseudo-Gothic structure on its foundations,
no part of _Bleak House_ was written at Broadstairs. Dickens, however,
for many summers, visited the little town on the curving bay between
Margate and Ramsgate; the Albion Hotel, where he notes that "the
landlord ha