mory of my childhood, and having a theory, that from such
memories the dust of the ages had better not be shaken, I had not
retraced my steps to its venerable walls. But the Tower is very
good--much less cockneyfied than I supposed it would seem to my maturer
vision; very vast and grand, historical and romantic. I could not get
into it, as it had been closed for Passion Week, but I was thus relieved
from the obligation to march about with a dozen fellow-starers in the
train of a didactic beef-eater, and I strolled at will through the
courts and the garden, sharing them only with the lounging soldiers of
the garrison, who made the place more picturesque. At Rochester I
stopped for the sake of its castle, which I spied from the
railway-train, perched on a grassy bank beside the widening Medway.
There were other reasons as well; the place has a small cathedral, and
one has read about it in Dickens, who lived during the latter years of
his life at Gadshill, a couple of miles from the town. All this Kentish
country, between London and Dover, figures indeed repeatedly in Dickens;
he is to a certain extent, for our own time, the _genius loci_. I found
this to be quite the case at Rochester. I had occasion to go into a
little shop kept by a talkative old woman who had a photograph of
Gadshill lying on her counter. This led to my asking her whether the
illustrious master of the house often made his appearance in the town.
"Oh, bless you, sir," she said, "we every one of us knew him to speak
to. He was in this very shop on the Tuesday with a party of
foreigners--as he was dead in his bed on the Friday. He 'ad on his black
velvet suit, and it always made him look so 'andsome. I said to my
'usband, 'I _do_ think Charles Dickens looks so nice in that black
velvet suit.' But he said he couldn't see as he looked any way
particular. He was in this very shop on the Tuesday, with a party of
foreigners." Rochester consists of little more than one long street,
stretching away from the castle and the river toward neighboring
Chatham, and edged with low brick houses, of intensely provincial
aspect, most of which have some small, dull quaintness of gable or
casement. Nearly opposite to the shop of the old lady with the
dissentient husband is a little dwelling with an inscribed slab set into
its face, which must often have provoked a smile in the great master of
laughter. The slab relates that in the year 1579 Richard Watts here
established a c