The picture-sign of the “Crispin and Crispianus” is said to be a copy of a painting in the church of St. Pantaléon at Troyes, and certainly (but chiefly because of much varnish, and the dust and grime of the road) looks very Old-Masterish. The two saints, seated uncomfortably close to one another, and looking very sheepish, appear to be cutting out a piece of leather to the order of an interesting and gigantic pirate. A mysterious incident occurred in 1830 at this house, in the death of a man who had acted as ostler at the coaching inns of Rochester and Chatham, and had afterwards tramped the country as a hawker. He lay here dying, in an upper room, and told the doctor who was called to him the almost incredible story that he was really Charles Parrott Hanger, Earl of Coleraine, and not “Charley Roberts,” the name he had usually been known by for twenty years. Although his life had been so squalid and apparently poverty-stricken, he left £1,000 to his son, Charles Henry Hanger. The “Crispin and Crispianus,” in common with most other erstwhile humble inns, has experienced a social levelling-up since the time when Dickens mentioned it as a house where tramping tinkers and itinerant clock-makers, coming into Strood “yonder, by the blasted ash,” might lie. In these times, when the blasted dust of the Dover road is the most noticeable feature, and a half-century has effected all manner of wonderful changes, tramps and their kin find no harbourage at the old house, whose invitation to cyclists and amateur photographers sufficiently emphasises its improved status. In _Great Expectations_ is found a notice of the “Cross Keys,” Wood Street, Cheapside, a coaching inn abolished in the ’70’s; but it is merely an incidental reference, on the occasion of Pip’s coming to London by coach from Rochester. The inns of that story are, indeed, not well seen, and although that little boarded inn at Cooling, the “Horseshoe and Castle,” is identified as the “Three Jolly Bargemen” of the tale, you can find in those pages no illuminating descriptive phrase on which to put your finger and say, conscientiously, “Found!” Only at the close of the story, where, in Chapter LIV., Pip is endeavouring to smuggle the convict, Magwitch, out of the country, down the Thames, do we find an inn easily identified. That is the melancholy waterside house below Gravesend, standing solitary on a raised bank of stones, where Pip lands: “It was a dirty place enough, and I daresay not unknown to smuggling adventurers; but there was a good fire in the kitchen, and there were eggs and bacon to eat, and various liquors to drink. Also there were two double-bedded rooms--‘such as they were,’ the landlord said.” Outside there was mud: mud and slimy stones, and rotten, slimy stakes sticking out of the water, and a grey outlook across the broad river.