Among the many friends we made at Rochester, was Mr. Syms, the respected Manager of the Gas Company, and an old resident in the city. To this gentleman we are indebted for several reminiscences of Dickens and his works. He fancies that _The Mystery of Edwin Drood_ owed its origin to the following strange local event that happened many years ago. A well-to-do person, a bachelor (who lived somewhere near the site of the present Savings Bank in High St., Rochester, Chatham end), was the guardian and trustee of a nephew (a minor), who was the inheritor of a large property. Business, pleasure, or a desire to seek health, took the nephew to the West Indies, from whence he returned somewhat unexpectedly. After his return he suddenly disappeared, and was supposed to have gone another voyage, but no one ever saw or heard of him again, and the matter was soon forgotten. When, however, certain excavations were being made for some improvements or additions to the Bank, the skeleton of a young man was discovered; and local tradition couples the circumstance with the probability of the murder of the nephew by the uncle. Mr. Syms thought that the "Crozier," which is probably a set off to the "Mitre," the orthodox hotel where Mr. Datchery put up with his "portmanteau," was probably the city coffee-house, an old hotel of the coaching days, which stood on the site now occupied by the London County Bank. "It was a hotel of a most retiring disposition," and "business was chronically slack at the 'Crozier,'" which probably accounts for its dissolution. Another suggestion is that the "Crozier" may have been "The Old Crown," a fifteenth-century house, which was pulled down in 1864. He could not identify the "Tilted Wagon," the "cool establishment on the top of a hill." It is generally admitted that "Mr. Thomas Sapsea, Auctioneer, &c.," was a compound of two originals well known in Rochester--a Mr. B. and a Mr. F., who had many of the characteristics of the quondam Mayor of Cloisterham. Mr. Sapsea's house is the fine old timbered building opposite Eastgate House, which has been previously alluded to. The "Travellers' Twopenny" of _Edwin Drood_, where Deputy, _alias_ Winks, lodged, Mr. Syms thought to have been a cheap lodging-house well known in that locality, which stood at the junction of Frog Alley and Crow Lane, originally called "The Duck," and subsequently "Kitt's Lodging-house." But, like less interesting and more important relics of the past, this has disappeared, to make way for modern improvements. It had been partly burnt down before. To satisfy ourselves, we go over the ground, which is near Mr. Franklin Homan's furniture establishment.