"The inn where friends used to put up, and where we used to go to see parents, and to have salmon and fowls, and be tipped. It had an ecclesiastical sign--the 'mitre'--and a bar that seemed to be the next best thing to a bishopric, it was so snug. I loved the landlord's youngest daughter to distraction--but let that pass. It was in this inn that I was cried over by my little rosy sister, because I had acquired a black eye in a fight." When the little Charles Dickens was taken away to London inside the stage-coach Commodore--his kind master on the night before having come flitting in among the packing-cases to give him Goldsmith's _Bee_ as a keepsake--he was leaving behind for ever, in the playing-field near Clover Lane and the grounds of Rochester Castle and the green drives of Cobham Park, the untroubled dreams of happy childhood. And though he could not know this, yet, as he sat amongst the damp straw piled up round him in the inside of the coach, he "consumed his sandwiches in solitude and dreariness" and thought life sloppier than he had expected to find it. And in _David Copperfield_ he has thrown back into those earlier golden days the shadow of his London privations by bringing the little Copperfield, footsore and tired, toiling towards dusk into Chatham, "which, in that night's aspect is a mere dream of chalk and drawbridges and mastless ships in a muddy river, roofed like Noah's arks". No doubt the terrible old Jew in the marine-stores shop, who rated and frightened David with his "Oh, my eyes and limbs, what do you want? Oh, my lungs and liver, what do you want? Oh--goroo, goroo!"--until the helpless little fellow was obliged to close with an offer of a few pence instead of half a crown for his waistcoat, is the portrait of some actual Jew dealer whom, in one of the back streets of Chatham, the keen eyes of the precocious child, seeming to look at nothing, had curiously watched hovering like a hideous spider on the pounce behind his grime-encrusted window. It was old associations that led Dickens so often in his walks from Gadshill Place to Chatham. But the neighbourhood which gave him most pleasure, combining as it did with similar associations an exquisite beauty, was, Forster tells us, the sylvan scenery of Cobham Park. The green woods and green shades of Cobham would recur to his memory even in far-off Lausanne, and the last walk that he ever enjoyed--on the day before his fatal seizure--was through these woods, the charm of which cannot be better defined than in his own description in _Pickwick_: