into it, as it had been closed for Passion Week, but I was thus relieved from the obligation to march about with a dozen fellow-starers in the train of a didactic beef-eater, and I strolled at will through the courts and the garden, sharing them only with the lounging soldiers of the garrison, who made the place more picturesque. At Rochester I stopped for the sake of its castle, which I spied from the railway-train, perched on a grassy bank beside the widening Medway. There were other reasons as well; the place has a small cathedral, and one has read about it in Dickens, who lived during the latter years of his life at Gadshill, a couple of miles from the town. All this Kentish country, between London and Dover, figures indeed repeatedly in Dickens; he is to a certain extent, for our own time, the _genius loci_. I found this to be quite the case at Rochester. I had occasion to go into a little shop kept by a talkative old woman who had a photograph of Gadshill lying on her counter. This led to my asking her whether the illustrious master of the house often made his appearance in the town. "Oh, bless you, sir," she said, "we every one of us knew him to speak to. He was in this very shop on the Tuesday with a party of foreigners--as he was dead in his bed on the Friday. He 'ad on his black velvet suit, and it always made him look so 'andsome. I said to my 'usband, 'I _do_ think Charles Dickens looks so nice in that black velvet suit.' But he said he couldn't see as he looked any way particular. He was in this very shop on the Tuesday, with a party of foreigners." Rochester consists of little more than one long street, stretching away from the castle and the river toward neighboring Chatham, and edged with low brick houses, of intensely provincial aspect, most of which have some small, dull quaintness of gable or casement. Nearly opposite to the shop of the old lady with the dissentient husband is a little dwelling with an inscribed slab set into its face, which must often have provoked a smile in the great master of laughter. The slab relates that in the year 1579 Richard Watts here established a charity which should furnish "six poor travelers, not rogues or proctors," one night's lodging and entertainment gratis and four pence in the morning to go on their way withal, and that in memory of his "munificence" the stone has lately been renewed. The inn at Rochester was poor, and I felt strongly tempted to knock at the door of Mr. Watts's asylum, under plea of being neither a rogue nor a proctor. The poor traveler who avails himself of the testamentary four pence may easily resume his journey as far as Chatham without breaking his treasure. Is not this the place where little Davy Copperfield slept under a cannon on his journey from London to Dover, to join his aunt, Miss Trotwood? The two towns are really but one, which forms an interminable crooked thoroughfare, crowded, in the dusk, as I measured