e wood, and the truculently humorous tramp, who tells
the Beadle: "Why, blow your little town! who wants to be in it? Wot does
your dirty little town mean by comin' and stickin' itself in the road to
anywhere?"--all are closely scanned and noted, as they mount or descend
Strood Hill in perennial procession. Dickens was himself a sturdy and
inveterate pedestrian. When he suffered from insomnia he would think
nothing of rising in the middle of the night and taking a thirty miles'
spin before breakfast.

[Illustration: THE LEATHER BOTTLE, COBHAM]

"Coming in just now," he wrote in his third year at Gadshill,
"after twelve miles in the rain, I was so wet that I have had to
change and get my feet into warm water before I could do anything."

In February, 1865, he wrote:

"I got frost-bitten by walking continually in the snow, and getting
wet in the feet daily. My boots hardened and softened, hardened and
softened, my left foot swelled, and I still forced the boot on; sat
in it to write, half the day; walked in it through the snow, the
other half; forced the boot on again next morning; sat and walked
again; and being accustomed to all sorts of changes in my feet,
took no heed. At length, going out as usual, I fell lame on the
walk, and had to limp home dead lame, through the snow, for the
last three miles--to the remarkable terror, by the way, of the two
big dogs."

It is hardly necessary to say that Dickens never so absorbed the local
spirit and genius of that part of rural England which he knew and loved
best as the Brontes absorbed the spirit of the Yorkshire moorlands, or
Mr. Hardy the spirit of Wessex, or Mr. Eden Phillpotts the spirit of
Dartmoor, or Sir A. Quiller-Couch the spirit of the "Delectable Duchy".
He was too busy and preoccupied a man for this, and had too much of his
life and work behind him, when he made his permanent home in
"Dickens-land". And Gadshill was too near to the bustle and stir of
Chatham to furnish a purely idyllic environment or entirely
unsophisticated rusticity. But it is not unduly fanciful to discover the
influence of Kentish scenery, with its bright, clear atmosphere, its
undulating slopes of green woodland and green hop fields, pink-and-white
orchards, and golden harvests--the prettiest though not the most
beautiful scenery in England--upon his conception of a typical

"English home--grey twilight pour'd