If my imaginary traveller comes to Rochester without having read that tale he will be singularly fortunate. Otherwise he will have an uneasy feeling as he stands and gazes a moment upon the west front of the Cathedral, or peeps into the nave, that it ought to be re-consecrated. This, of course, is a tribute to Dickens' descriptive and narrative powers that clothe the doings of his characters with so great an air of reality; but how unfortunate for those who like their murders to be decently old and historical that he should have brought the atmosphere of the police-court into the grave and reverend air of this ancient city. My traveller, happily unversed in all this, will gaze upon the Cathedral and the Castle Keep, where the rooks are circling to rest, and, coming again into the High Street, will turn to his inn, where appetite, sharpened by pedestrianism and fresh air, may be appeased as well now as in those days of heavy drinking and no less heavy eating, when seventy-two coaches passed through Rochester daily and the trains that thunder across the Medway were undreamt of. The inns of Rochester receive, as may well be supposed, many pilgrims who for love of Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Dickens, come hither, not alone from all parts of England, but from America, and even from foreign-speaking countries, and the visitors' books testify not only to their opinions of the place but also of each other. Thus at one inn I read the signatures of a party of Germans, to which some prejudiced Briton, after sundry offensive remarks about foreigners in general and Germans in particular, adds, "They are everywhere, d----n them!" But I must confess that the following surprised me, even after a long acquaintance with the inanities of visitors' books. Some one had remarked "How like Rochester Cathedral was to a Catholic Church," whereupon some other idiot adds, "Of course it is Catholic, but not Roman Catholic." Really one scarcely knows whom to pity most. [Sidenote: THE "BULL"]