beautiful little line of railroad. The eight miles walk from
Maidstone to Rochester, and a visit to the Druidical altar on the
wayside, are charming. This could be accomplished on the Tuesday;
and Wednesday we might look about us at Chatham, coming home by
Cobham on Thursday."

The other side--the dreary marshes lying between the Medway and the
Thames, a dark, flat wilderness intersected by dykes and mounds and
gates--had associations not less intimate. In _David Copperfield_
Dickens transferred the dreams and the events of his childhood to an
alien setting. In _Great Expectations_ he invents a fictitious story in
harmony with scenes in which he delighted to retrace his childish
memories. Again, the amphibian creatures which he lightly sketches in
_Great Expectations_, and more elaborately in _Our Mutual Friend_, had
first impressed themselves on his imagination as he rambled, a tiny,
eager-eyed boy, about the dockyards and waterside alleys of Chatham, or
made trips to Sheerness with "Mr. Micawber", that is to say, his
father, in the Navy Pay yacht, though he long afterwards pursued his
studies of them more exhaustively at Wapping and the Isle of Dogs, and
in expeditions with the Thames police. It was from a walk with Leech
through Chatham by-streets that he gathered the hint of Charley Hexam
and his father, for _Our Mutual Friend_, from the sight of "the
uneducated father in fustian and the educated boy in spectacles".

But when Dickens took Rochester once more for the background of a story
in _Edwin Drood_ there seems, to us in our knowledge of the event,
something almost ominous. It suggests Waller's famous simile of the stag
that returns to die where it was roused. Dickens's last visit to the
town was to stimulate his imagination for the conference between
Datchery and the Princess Puffer at the entrance to the "Monks'
Vineyard". On the last day of his life he was busy, in the chalet in the
garden at Gadshill Place, embodying the fancies which he had gathered
and fused on that last visit. On the last page which he was to write he
endeavoured to record--for the last time--his sense of the atmosphere of
the old city.

"A brilliant morning shines on the old city. Its antiquities and
ruins are surpassingly beautiful, with the lusty ivy gleaming in
the sun, and the rich trees waving in the balmy air. Changes of
glorious light from moving boughs, songs of birds, scents from