deal of room in it—is gruffish, and comes down upon you, sharp.” It is easy, too, with the help of our guide, to follow the shivering child along the cliffs to Miss Trotwood’s—nay, to identify the “very neat little cottage, with cheerful bow-windows,” where that good soul looked after Mr. Dick, and defended her “immaculate grass-plot” against marauding donkeys. It is this present writer’s privilege to know a charming elderly lady who boasts of Dover as her birthplace, and who, when she has exhausted the other lions of that town, is accustomed to close her remarks with the statement that she “lived for years within a stone’s-throw of Miss Betsy Trotwood’s cottage.” Occasionally the Superior Person (who, alas, is rarely absent nowadays!) points out with a smile of tolerance that neither Miss Trotwood nor yet her house ever existed save in the novelist’s brain. Whereupon this charming old lady shakes her finger testily at the transgressor, and exclaims, “It is quite evident that you have never lived in Dover. Miss Betsy Trotwood a myth, indeed! Let me tell you that my own mother knew the dear woman well—yes, and that delightful Mr. Dick too; and she remembered seeing Mr. Dickens drive up in a fly from the railway station to visit them. Of course their names were not ‘Trotwood’ and ‘Dick’ at all; it would never have done for Mr. Dickens to put them in his book under the real names, particularly as Mr. Dick was related to many good families in that part of Kent. I have even a dim recollection of seeing Miss Trotwood being wheeled about in a bath-chair when I was a very little girl and she a very old woman. Myth, indeed! Why, there are old men in Dover now who were warned off the grass-plot by David Copperfield’s aunt when they were donkey-boys.” The animation of the speaker shows that she believes everything she says. Perhaps a lady possessing the characteristics of Miss Betsy did once upon a time inhabit the cottage in Dover. Perhaps there was a real Mr. Dick. Otherwise these recollections are but another example of that hypnotism exercised over posterity by the great romancers, to which allusion has already been made.