"Visitors in want of breakfast--unless they were horses or cattle, for which class of guests there was preparation enough in the way of water-trough and hay--were so unusual at the sign of the Tilted Wagon that it took a long time to get the wagon into the track of tea and toast and bacon; Neville, in the interval, sitting in a sanded parlour, wondering in how long a time after he had gone the sneezy fire of damp fagots would begin to make somebody else warm. Indeed, the Tilted Wagon was a cool establishment on the top of a hill, where the ground before the door was puddles with damp hoofs and trodden straw; where a scolding landlady slapped a moist baby (with one red sock on and one wanting) in the bar; where the cheese was cast aground upon a shelf in company with a mouldy table-cloth and a green-handled knife in a sort of cast-iron canoe; where the pale-faced bread shed tears of crumbs over its shipwreck in another canoe; where the family linen, half-washed and half dried, led a public life of lying about; where everything to drink was drunk out of mugs, and everything else was suggestive of a rhyme to mugs: the Tilted Wagon, all these things considered, hardly kept its painted promise of providing good entertainment for man and beast." Mr. Edwin Harris, in his guide to Dickensian Rochester, has identified the Coach and Horses on the top of Strood Hill as the original of the Tilted Wagon. The Travellers' Twopenny, where the boy deputy was a "man-servant," as he explained to Jasper, was originally the White Duck, and afterwards Kit's lodging-house, and stood in the Maidstone Road at Rochester. It degenerated into a crazy wooden sort of cheap public-house, and was not demolished before it was necessary. On its site now stands a business warehouse. The Crozier, the "Orthodox Hotel," where Datchery lodged in the same city, was the Crown, and is dealt with in "The Inns and Taverns of Pickwick." In the late autumn of 1857, Dickens and Wilkie Collins started "on a ten or twelve days' expedition to out-of-the-way places, to do (in inns and coast corners) a little tour in search of an article and in avoidance of railroads." Their selection was the Lake District, but the outcome of their expedition was not one article merely but a series of five under the title of _The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices_, written in collaboration. The two idle apprentices were Francis Goodchild and Thomas Idle, the first name being the pseudonym of Dickens. These misguided young men, they inform us in the narrative, "were actuated by the low idea of making a perfectly idle trip in any direction. They had no intention of going anywhere in particular; they wanted to see nothing; they wanted to know nothing; they wanted to learn nothing; they wanted to do nothing. They wanted only to be idle ... and they were both idle in the last degree." In that spirit they set forth on their journey.