Few people, as Dickens says, can tell where Rochester ends and Chatham begins, but even now you become conscious of a gradual alteration in the character of the street as you leave Rochester High Street and come imperceptibly into Chatham; and even though the place has grown so large, and holds so very varied a population that the military and naval sections no longer bulk so largely as they used, they still make a brave show. An inhabitant of Chatham need never wish to visit London, because the triple towns of Chatham, Strood and Rochester--to leave out all count of Gillingham and New Brompton, which are to Chatham even as Hammersmith is to our own great metropolis--contain samples of nearly all that is to be seen in the Capital of the Empire, and much else besides. There is a Dockyard at Chatham two miles in length, from which there issues every day at the dinner-hour an army of artificers of every kind and degree--many thousands of them; and in this Dockyard are ironclads, making, repairing, and refitting together with vast military and naval stores, and all kinds of relics, foremost among which there is a shed, full of old and historic figure-heads; all that is left of the wooden walls that were such efficient bulwarks of England's power. _Agamemnons_, _Arethusas_, _Bellerophons_ are here, and many more. And all around are forts and "lines," barracks and military hospitals; and drilling, manoeuvring, marchings and counter-marchings, and all kinds of military exercises are continually going forward. The names of streets, courts, and alleys, would furnish a very Walhalla of naval heroes, and from all quarters come the sounds of riveting, the blasts of bugles, and the shouting of the captains; and when midday comes the noontide gun resounds from the heights of Fort Pitt, and all the ragged urchins who live on the pavements fall down as if they were shot, much to the terror of old ladies, strangers in these parts, who pass by. There is still a fine old-time nautical flavour hanging about Chatham. It does not lie on the surface, but requires much patient searching amid mean and disreputable streets, and it is only after passing through slums that would affright a resident of Drury Lane that one finds curiously respectable little terraces, giving upon the waterside, with masts and yards, rigging, derricks, and other strange seafaring tackle peeping over the roof-tops; amphibious corners where a smell of the sea, largely intermixed with odours of pitch, tar, and rope, clings about everything; where men with a nautical lurch come swinging along the pavements, and where, if you glance in at the doorways which are nearly always open in summer, you will see full-rigged models of ships standing on sideboards, supported perhaps by a huge Family Bible, and flanked, most certainly, with strange outlandish shells, branches of coral, and other spoils of far-off lands.