Upnor Castle is not nowadays a strong place, but the long stretch of foreshore between it and the waterside, down-river, is occupied by great naval powder-magazines, and a pier for the Government light railway running at the rear is a feature. The castle has a certain picturesqueness, and is worth sketching; but the sketcher, selecting the best view-point by the riverside, is soon made aware that he has become an object of interest to the Metropolitan Police on watch within, and presently finds himself plied with amiable inquiries; these being times when espionage is very much to the front. [Illustration: UPNOR CASTLE.] The inquisitive stranger having thus attracted the attention of the police, and having--let us hope--duly satisfied them, may now make his way up the steep street again, and, reaching the cross-roads, soon come into Frindsbury. From this village, with its hill-top church, whose spire is a prominent landmark, a descent is immediately made into the tramway-infested streets and congested areas of Strood; and from Strood the Medway is at once crossed, into Rochester. CHAPTER IV ROCHESTER AND CHATHAM--BROMPTON--GILLINGHAM--GRANGE--OTTERHAM QUAY--LOWER HALSTOW--IWADE Very little change overtakes Rochester High Street, that narrow, rather gloomy, and distinctly dirty-looking thoroughfare. The Corn Exchange clock still projects its “moon face” over the pavement, as Dickens described it, “out of a grave, red building, as if Time carried on business there and hung out his sign”; and the ancient grime still clings to the brickwork houses, and the occasional old weatherboarded tenements still lack the new coats of paint cruelly denied them. One might expend much description upon the High Street of Rochester, from the famous “Bull” hotel of Pickwickian fame, and the tame, characterless front of the “Seven Poor Travellers,” on to the curiously weatherboarded Westgate of the Cathedral Close, familiarly known, through associations with “Edwin Drood,” as “Jasper’s Gateway,” and not forgetting the Early English crypt beneath the “George” inn, nearly opposite the “Bull,” a relic of which very few people know, and little to be suspected from the decidedly commonplace general appearance of that house. There is, indeed, room for a most interesting monograph upon this High Street. I always associate the little weatherboarded house and shop numbered 195, on the left hand as you go towards Chatham, with that where little David Copperfield had his adventure with the half-mad second-hand-clothes shopkeeper who said “Goroo, goroo,” and invoked his lungs and liver. It is a bootshop nowadays; but you go down into it from the street-level just as in the story.