This incident actually occurred to Dickens himself when a lad in the blacking factory, for he has admitted it to be so, in his own words, recorded in Forster's "Life," Book 1, Chapter XI. He there states that on the occasion in question he "went into a public-house in Parliament Street, which is still there, though altered, at the corner of the short street leading into Cannon Row." The public-house where it took place was the Red Lion at 48 Parliament Street, and is situated at the corner of Derby Street. There is a Red Lion public-house there to-day--not the same one Dickens visited--that was demolished in 1899--but on the same spot. It is more pretentious than the old one, but keeps its red lion rampant as a sign, and has a bust of the novelist, standing within a niche in the front of the building as a hall-mark of its Dickensian association. The "little public-house close to the river, with an open space before it, where some coal-heavers were dancing," referred to in the same chapter, was the Fox under the Hill[1] in the Adelphi. There are two inns in Canterbury associated with the book, the county inn where Mr. Dick stayed when on his visits to David Copperfield every alternate Wednesday, and the "little inn" where Mr. Micawber stayed on his first and subsequent visits to the ancient city. The county inn was without doubt the Royal Fountain Hotel in St. Margaret's Street, for it was invariably referred to in the coaching days as _the_ county inn of the city, in the same manner that David speaks of it in the seventeenth chapter of David Copperfield, where he tells us that he "saw Mr. Dick every alternate Wednesday when he arrived by stage-coach at noon, to stay until next morning.... Mr. Dick was very partial to gingerbread. To render his visits more agreeable, my aunt had instructed me to open a credit for him at a cake shop, which was hampered with the stipulation that he should not be served with more than one shilling's worth in the course of any one day. This, and the reference of all his little bills at the county inn where he slept, to my aunt, before they were paid, induced me to suspect that he was only allowed to rattle his money, and not to spend it."