existed for "planting the intellectual lever." Canterbury,--ah! Canterbury was a city he had often longed to see, and he had, more than once, half made up his mind to visit it, for mere curiosity. But, _now_, when his brains were in such a whirl with thinking about the lever, and finding such alarming difficulty in discovering the fulcrum--why he forgot Becket, and the Black Prince, and St. Augustine, and deferred all historical inquiries and all sight-seeing, and asked about nought but newspapers. "Newspapers, sir!"--exclaimed the landlord of the inn at which he alighted,--"newspapers!--why, Lord love ye! we have _four_ published here in Canterbury, already!" Mr. Mortimer stared more than ever he had stared in his life. "Four!" he echoed; "four! What sort o' papers are they, pray?" "Sort o' papers, sir!" answered the landlord, "why very capital papers: three of 'em at least,--them as is heddited by Mr. Mudford, a werry clever man, sir." "Mudford!--what--Mudford that used to edit the Courier?" "The werry same gen'lman, sir," answered the cockney landlord. Mr. Mortimer turned pale. "And the other paper?" he said, by way of question. "Oh! that, sir, is a low radical affair--"The Kent Herald;"--but I don't belong to that party, though they're werry strong here; and the paper sells well, they say." Mr. Mortimer sat down, and tried to think. He sipped a pint of sherry, and munched a couple of biscuits, and he _did_ think; for the result was, that he took coach in another hour, and set off for Chatham and Rochester. And now, Mr. Mortimer, singularly enough, rose from zero to fever heat, in his hopes and resolves about the fulcrum and the intellectual lever. "The four towns," as the Chatham people told him,--Strood, Rochester, Chatham, and Brompton, united as they were, lying around the basin of the Medway, filled with trading enterprise, blending so many great interests,--the dockyard, the soldiers' barracks, the hulks, the Dissenters, so all-powerful in Chatham, the Jew brokers, the cigar smugglers (or makers rather), the corporation of Rochester and its two members, and Chatham and its one member of Parliament, the cathedral, and the castle in ruins,--were all thrown upon Mr. Mortimer in such clustered phrases of inviting importance, that he completely lost his "rules of prudence," and proclaimed in a tone very like a shout, and very like Archimedes, only he didn't speak Greek,--"I have found it!" Yes: Mr. Mortimer declared he had found it; found the fulcrum for the lever, and the new newspaper _should_ be published at Chatham: the forty thousand inhabitants of the four towns, he said, were surely able to support a paper themselves. He was decided, he declared he was.