s delicious hollands", No. 12 (now 31) High Street, and Lawn
House, near Fort House, receiving him at different times. At Broadstairs
he wrote a portion of _Pickwick_, of _Nicholas Nickleby_, and _The Old
Curiosity Shop_, and he also stayed there while engaged on the _American
Notes_, _Dombey and Son_, and _David Copperfield_. He forsook it at
last, because it had become too noisy, but he has left an agreeable
picture of it in _Our Watering Place_; but a passage in a letter to
Forster invests it with still gayer colours:

"It is the brightest day you ever saw. The sun is sparkling on the
water so that I can hardly bear to look at it. The tide is in, and
the fishing boats are dancing like mad. Upon the green-topped
cliffs the corn is cut and piled in shocks; and thousands of
butterflies are fluttering about, taking the bright little red
flags at the mastheads for flowers, and panting with delight
accordingly."

To the characters and the _mise en scene_ of his novels, however,
Broadstairs appears to have contributed nothing, except that the lady
whose aversion to donkeys furnished so strong an idiosyncrasy to Miss
Betsy Trotwood's character was a native, not of Dover, as in the novel,
but of Broadstairs.

Dover, besides giving a local habitation to David's aunt, is associated
with _The Tale of Two Cities_, since it was here that Mr. Lorry made the
startling revelation to Miss Manette that her father had been "Recalled
to Life". The vignette of eighteenth-century Dover is executed with true
Dickensian verve:

[Illustration: CHALK CHURCH]

"The little narrow, crooked town of Dover hid itself away from the
beach, and ran its head into the chalk cliffs like a marine
ostrich. The beach was a desert of heaps of sea and stones tumbling
wildly about, and the sea did what it liked, and what it liked was
destruction. It thundered at the town, and thundered at the cliffs,
and brought the coast down, madly. The air among the houses was of
so strong a piscatory flavour that one might have supposed sick
fish went up to be dipped in it, as sick people went down to be
dipped in the sea. A little fishing was done in the port, and a
quantity of strolling about by night, and looking seaward:
particularly at those times when the tide made, and was near flood.
Small tradesmen, who did no business whatever, sometimes
unaccountably realized