To all and each of these places “Rambles in Dickens’ Land” leads the way, if the reader chooses to follow. A notable advantage of these rambles is the ease with which they may be undertaken. An ordinary healthy man or woman may set forth without apprehension in the author’s footsteps from the beginning to the end of any particular journey which he describes, and even the invalid may saunter through a “Ramble” without fatigue. Conveyances are only needed to bring the pilgrim to the starting-point of the voyage, and in several instances even these aids to locomotion may be dispensed with altogether when the sightseer is one after Dickens’ own heart—a sturdy pedestrian. By pursuing the routes indicated, there is no reason why a Grand Tour of Dickens’ Land should not be made by easy stages and at slight cost. Or the pilgrim may pick out some particular trip, when leisure and chance carry him in that direction. The volume is in truth a serviceable guide-book, leading its clients by the best ways, and even informing them where, when sight-seeing is over, a place may be found for rest, refreshment, and reflection. And it is happier than most guide-books in that it is never called upon to describe the stupid and uninteresting, which have no existence in Dickens’ Land. Into Dickens’ Land, therefore, my masters, an you will and when you will! The high-roads thither are always open, the lanes and by-paths are free for us to tread. He that found out this rare world has made it fully ours. Let us visit our inheritance, or revisit it, if that be the better word. Let us make real the scenes we have read of and dreamt of—peopling them with the folk of Dickens, so that familiar faces shall look upon us from familiar windows, familiar voices greet us as we pass. Shall we travel abroad in the fashion of the corresponding committee of the Pickwick Club? Then here is this book, with a wealth of shrewd information between its covers, ready to be our own particular Samuel Weller—to wear our livery, whether of sadness or of joy—to point out to us the sights and the notabilities, to be garrulous when we look for gossip, and silent when our mood is for silence—to act, in short, as that useful individual whom we all “rayther want,” “somebody to look arter us when we goes out a-wisitin’.”