“An ancient city, Cloisterham, and no meet dwelling-place for any one with hankerings after the noisy world. A monotonous, silent city, deriving an earthly flavour throughout, from its Cathedral crypt. . . . A drowsy city, Cloisterham, whose inhabitants seem to suppose, with an inconsistency more strange than rare, that all its changes lie behind it, and that there are no more to come. . . . So silent are the streets of Cloisterham (though prone to echo on the smallest provocation), that of a summer day the sunblinds of its shops scarce dare to flap in the south wind; while the sun-browned tramps who pass along and stare, quicken their limp a little that they may the sooner get beyond the confines of its oppressive respectability. This is a feat not difficult of achievement, seeing that the streets of Cloisterham city are little more than one narrow street by which you get into it, and get out of it; the rest being mostly disappointing yards with pumps in them and no thoroughfare—exception made of the Cathedral-close, and a paved Quaker settlement. . . . In a word, a city of another and a bygone time is Cloisterham, with its hoarse Cathedral bell, its hoarse rooks hovering about the Cathedral tower, its hoarser and less distinct rooks in the stalls far beneath. Fragments of old wall, saint’s chapel, chapter-house, convent, and monastery have got incongruously or obstructively built into many of its houses and gardens, much as kindred jumbled notions have become incorporated into many of its citizens’ minds. All things in it are of the past.” [Picture: Eastgate House, Rochester] Entering the busier part of the town by the Eastgate thoroughfare, we may shortly observe, on the right, Eastgate House, now occupied by the CITY OF ROCHESTER WORKMEN’S CLUB. It is a fine old Elizabethan building; a well-preserved specimen of the domestic architecture of the sixteenth century. The building abuts on the street, with a large courtyard and entrance at the side; and a spacious garden is attached at the back of the house. For more than fifty years (until about twenty years since) this establishment flourished as a ladies’ boarding-school, and is referred to in the pages of “Edwin Drood” as The Nuns’ House, the seminary conducted by the eminently respectable _Miss Twinkleton_—