Leaving Gravesend, you come down again to the shore by turning to the left out of the main road by the tramway terminus and through the unlovely region of “Coal Road,” past the “Canal Tavern,” and over the Thames and Medway Canal by a footbridge. Here, along the waterside, is the office of a person described on his sign-board as an “Explosive Lighterman.” The place where this alarming creature carries on business is Denton Wharf. Adjoining is the “Ship and Lobster” tavern. Out in front stretches the Thames estuary. It is the spot referred to by Dickens in “Great Expectations,” Chapter LIV., in which Pip is engaged in smuggling the convict, Magwitch, out of the country. The building seen in the distance, by the waterside, is Shornemead Battery. [Illustration: CURIOUS OLD BOAT-COTTAGE AT CHALK.] It is a curious region: the deserted Thames and Medway Canal on the right, the busy Thames on the left; and it is rendered yet more curious by the whimsical old cottage presently seen, standing in the narrow space between canal and river; an odd, amphibious building, the lower part brick, the upper portion made of an old man-o’-war’s barge, placed keel upwards. It is almost exactly such another as Peggotty’s boat-house on Yarmouth sands, imagined and described by Dickens in “David Copperfield.” The old _Wellington_ man-o’-war’s boat was sold out of the service about 1822, and the cottage has been here since then; obviously, therefore, it must have been well known to Dickens, whose honeymoon days were passed at the neighbouring village of Chalk in 1836. “David Copperfield” was not written until 1850, so it is plain he must have had this queer old place in mind. It is true that the Peggotty home is described as being in its natural position, keel downwards, and that this old boat of the _Wellington_ man-o’-war is upside down, and forms both roof and upper floor of the cottage; but these are mere matter-of-fact details easily surmounted in a work of fiction. In all these years these stout timbers have served to shelter the present occupant and his father, and if the occasional tarring they receive is not forgotten, they bid fair to last many generations longer. The upper floor is divided into two bedrooms, and you “come aboard” into them from the brick-walled lower story up a very maritime-looking hatchway. The interior is very quaint, showing the ribs, and, in fact, the whole construction of the boat, while the bedroom, which has the additional advantage of a window cut in the stern, quite realises David Copperfield’s view of the bedroom in the Peggotty establishment, as “the completest and most desirable bedroom ever seen.”