The evolutions of this "ceremony of the utmost grandeur and importance" proceed. Mr. Pickwick and his two friends (Mr. Tupman "had suddenly disappeared, and was nowhere to be found"), who are told to keep back, get hustled and pushed by the crowd, and the unoffending Mr. Snodgrass, who is in "the very extreme of human torture," is derided and asked "vere he vos a shovin' to." Subsequently they get hemmed in by the crowd, "are exposed to a galling fire of blank cartridges, and harassed by the operations of the military." Mr. Pickwick loses his hat, and not only regains that useful article of dress, but finds the lost Mr. Tupman, and the Pickwickians make the acquaintance of old Wardle and his hospitable family from Dingley Dell, by whom they are heartily entertained, and from whom they receive a warm invitation to visit Manor Farm on the morrow. There is a fine view of Chatham and Rochester from the fields round Fort Pitt, and on a bright sunny morning the air coming over from the Kentish Hills is most refreshing, very different indeed to what it was on a certain evening in Mr. Winkle's life, when "a melancholy wind sounded through the deserted fields like a giant whistling for his house-dog." We ramble about for an hour or more, and in imagination call up the pleasant times which Charles Dickens, as a boy, spent here. [Illustration: Fort Pitt, Chatham.] Almost every inch of the ground must have been gone over by him. What a delightful "playing-field" this and the neighbouring meadows must have been to him and his young companions, before the railway and the builder took possession of some of the lower portions of the hill which forms the base of Fort Pitt. "Here," says Mr. Langton, "is the place where the schools of Rochester and Chatham used to meet to settle their differences, and to contend in the more friendly rivalry of cricket," and no doubt Dickens frequently played when "Joe Specks" in Dullborough "kept wicket." In after life the memory of the past came back to Dickens with all its freshness, when he again visited the neighbourhood as the _Uncommercial Traveller_ in "Dullborough":-- "With this tender remembrance upon me" [that of leaving Chatham as a boy], "I was cavalierly shunted back into Dullborough the other day, by train. My ticket had been previously collected, like my taxes, and my shining new portmanteau had had a great plaster stuck upon it, and I had been defied by Act of Parliament to offer an objection to anything that was done to it, or me, under a penalty of not less than forty shillings or more than five pounds, compoundable for a term of imprisonment. When I had sent my disfigured property on to the hotel, I began to look about me; and the first discovery I made, was, that the Station had swallowed up the playing-field.