"I have my eyes upon a piece of Kentish road, bordered on either side by a wood, and having on one hand, between the road dust and the trees, a skirting patch of grass. Wild flowers grow in abundance on this spot, and it lies high and airy, with a distant river stealing steadily away to the ocean, like a man's life. To gain the milestone here, which the moss, primroses, violets, bluebells and wild roses would soon render illegible but for peering travellers pushing them aside with their sticks, you must come up a steep hill, come which way you may. So, all the tramps with carts or caravans--the gipsy tramp, the show tramp, the Cheap Jack--find it impossible to resist the temptations of the place, and all turn the horse loose when they come to it, and boil the pot. Bless the place, I love the ashes of the vagabond fires that have scorched its grass!" The Kentish road that Dickens thus describes is certainly the Dover Road at Gadshill, from which, of course, there is a steep declivity whether the route is westward to Gravesend or eastwards to Strood and Rochester. In Strood itself Dickens found little to interest him, though the view of Rochester from Strood Hill is an arresting one, with the stately mediaevalism of Castle and Cathedral emerging from a kind of haze in which it is hard to distinguish what is smoke-wreath and what a mass of crowding roofs. The Medway, which divides Strood from the almost indistinguishably overlapping towns of Rochester, Chatham, and Brompton, is crossed by an iron bridge, superseding the old stone structure commemorated in _Pickwick_. Mr. Pickwick's notes on "the four towns" do not require very much modification to apply to their present state. "The principal productions", he wrote, "appear to be soldiers, sailors, Jews, chalk, shrimps, officers, and dockyard men. The commodities chiefly exposed for sale in the public streets are marine stores, hard-bake, apples, flat-fish, and oysters. The streets present a lively and animated appearance, occasioned chiefly by the conviviality of the military.... The consumption of tobacco in these towns must be very great, and the smell which pervades the streets must be exceedingly delicious to those who are extremely fond of smoking. A superficial traveller might object to the dirt, which is their leading characteristic, but to those who view it as an indication of traffic and commercial prosperity, it is truly gratifying." [Illustration: ROCHESTER FROM STROOD]