“In this opinion also both Mr. Winkle and Mr. Snodgrass expressed their concurrence; and having been directed to the Leather Bottle, a clean and commodious village ale-house, the three travellers entered, and at once inquired for a gentleman of the name of Tupman. The three friends entered a long, low-roofed room, furnished with a large number of high-backed leather-cushioned chairs, of fantastic shapes, and embellished with a great variety of old portraits. At the upper end of the room was a table, with a white cloth upon it, well covered with a roast fowl, bacon, ale, and et ceteras; and at the table sat Mr. Tupman, looking as unlike a man who had taken his leave of the world as possible.” Resting here awhile, we may recall the “immortal discovery” made by Mr. Pickwick, “which has been the pride and boast of his friends and the envy of every antiquarian in this or any other country”—that famous stone found by the chairman of the Pickwick Club himself; “partially buried in the ground in front of a cottage door,” in this same village of Cobham, on which “the following fragment of an inscription was clearly to be deciphered”:— [Picture: Cobham Inscription] Full particulars are duly recorded in “The Pickwick Papers,” chapter 11. We may also remember the celebrated controversy in scientific and erudite circles, to which this remarkable stone gave rise; Mr. Pickwick being “elected an honorary member of seventeen native and foreign societies for the discovery.” The journey being resumed from Sole Street, we travel _viâ Strood_, ten miles, to the important station of CHATHAM. Mr. Pickwick’s description (taken from his note-book sixty years since) is a fairly correct view of the general appearance of Chatham at present:— “The principal productions of these towns appear to be soldiers, sailors, Jews, chalk, shrimps, officers, and dockyardmen. The commodities chiefly exposed for sale in the public streets are marine stores, hard-bake, apples, flat-fish, and oysters. The streets present a lively and animated appearance, occasioned chiefly by the conviviality of the military.” In this city five years of Dickens’s boyhood were passed. Mr. Dickens, senior, was appointed in 1816 to a clerkship at the Naval Pay Office, in connection with the Royal Dockyard, and the Dickens family here resided till little Charles was nine years of age. On arrival at the Chatham Station, we may enter the town on the right from the railway exit (north side of the line), shortly passing under an archway into Railway Street—formerly Rome Lane—in which was once situated the elementary school where the boy first attended, with his sister Fanny. Revisiting Chatham in after years, Dickens found that it had been pulled down