On dewy pastures, dewy trees,
Softer than sleep--all things in order stored,
A haunt of ancient Peace".

Though no local name is attached to it, and no local tradition
identifies it with any particular spot, there is no difficulty in fixing
in the very heart of "Dickens-land" the picture upon which the "Battle
of Life" is opened: the joyous dance of two girls, "quite unconstrained
and careless", "in one little orchard attached to an old stone house
with a honeysuckle porch", "while some half-dozen peasant women standing
on ladders, gathering the apples from the trees, stopped in their work
to look down, and share their enjoyment".

"As they danced among the orchard trees, and down the groves of
stems and back again, and twirled each other lightly round and
round, the influence of their airy motion seemed to spread and
spread, in the sunlighted scene, like an expanding circle in the
water. Their streaming hair and fluttering skirts, the elastic
grass beneath their feet, the boughs that rustled in the morning
air--the flushing leaves, their speckled shadows on the soft green
ground--the balmy wind that swept along the landscape, glad to turn
the distant windmill, cheerily--everything between the two girls,
and the man and team at plough upon the ridge of land, where they
showed against the sky as if they were the last things in the
world--seemed dancing too."

Something, too, of the love of good cheer, quaint old Christmas customs,
of junketings in ancient farmhouse kitchens and the parlours of ancient
hostelries, which has made Dickens the early Victorian apostle of
Yuletide "wassail", can be derived from his having "powlert up and down"
in a county abounding with comfortable manor houses and cosy inns. It is
a ripe and mellow tradition of good cheer, that is quite distinct from
the bovine stolidity of a harvest home in George Eliot's Loamshire or
the crude animalism of Meredith's Gaffer Gammon. For Kent, even from
the time of Caesar's Commentaries, has been "the civil'st place of all
the isle".

That is the aspect of Dickens's country on the one side--the side which,
some years before he established himself at Gadshill, he mapped out,
already knowing it intimately, to show to Forster in a brief excursion:

"You will come down booked for Maidstone (I will meet you at
Paddock-wood), and we will go thither in company over a most