It is first referred to on the occasion when Pip had promised "at his peril" to bring Joe home from it. "There was a bar at the Jolly Bargemen," Pip tells us, "with some alarmingly long chalk scores in it on the wall at the side of the door" which seemed never to be paid off. They had been there ever since he could remember, and had grown more than he had. There was a common-room at the end of the passage with a bright large kitchen fire, where Joe smoked his pipe in company with Mr. Wopsle. It was here that Pip again encountered his convict who stirred his drink with the file Pip had borrowed for him earlier in the story, and where he was presented with a shilling wrapped in "two fat sweltering one-pound notes that seemed to have been on terms of the warmest intimacy with all the cattle markets in the country." It is the scene of many incidents in the story. Indeed, it was the meeting place of all the men of the village, to whom Mr. Wopsle read the news round the fire, and where all the gossip of the district was retailed. The Horseshoe and Castle is a typical village inn, in all appearances like a doll's house, built of wood in a quite plain fashion, lying a little back from the road. It was in this inn that Mr. Jaggers unexpectedly appeared one day enquiring for Pip, which ultimately resulted in the change in Pip's fortune and his journey to London. Pip's journey from "our town," as he calls it, to the Metropolis, was, we read, "a journey of about five hours. It was a little past midday when the four-horse stage-coach by which I was passenger got into the ravel of traffic frayed out about the Cross Keys, Wood Street, Cheapside, London." This incident of the early life of Pip, related in 1860, was a reminiscence of Dickens's early childhood, which he recalls in _The Uncommercial Traveller_, when he tells us that, as a small boy, he "left Dullborough in the days when there were no railroads in the land," and he left it in a stage-coach. "Through all the years that have since passed," he goes on, "have I ever lost the smell of the damp straw in which I was packed--like game--and forwarded, carriage paid, to the Cross Keys, Wood Street, Cheapside, London.... The coach that carried me away was melodiously called Timpson's Blue-Eyed Maid, and belonged to Timpson at the coach office up street." In speaking of Dullborough and "our town," it is known that Dickens was referring to Rochester. The Cross Keys was a notable coaching inn of those days, and the Rochester coaches started and ended their journey there. It was demolished over fifty years ago. Although Dickens does not give us one of his pleasant pen-pictures of it, he refers to it occasionally in other of his stories, such as _Little Dorrit_ and _Nicholas Nickleby_. Another one-time famous London inn, referred to in _Great Expectations_, but no longer existing, is Hummum's, in Covent Garden.