 Chapter 1 Some years ago, on a bright morning in the beginning of September, three men, each eager for the enjoyment of the pure air, and eye-refreshing greenery of the country, and the invigorating breezes of the coast, were sitting in a dim and dingy room in Simmons Inn, the dimness and dinginess of which contrasted unfavourably even with such sunlight as could be found on the farther side of dingy feta lane. One of the three was a clergyman, but did not look like one, and another, who was not a clergyman, had much more of the conventional clerical aspect, though it was the opinion of the curate imparted to the author in a confidential whisper, that in his endeavour to look like a clergyman, he only succeeded in looking like a sheriff's officer in disguise. The third man was the present writer, who looks like, it is hard to say what, for he was once erroneously supposed to be a retired acrobat, and on another occasion was mistaken for a Wesleyan minister. We were arranging the programme of a holiday trip to the seaside, and had no difficulty in determining that our destination should be the coast of Kent. The gentleman who cultivated a clerical aspect, but had been deterred from taking orders by consideration of the difficulty of bringing up six daughters upon the stipend of a curate, had a married sister living at Dover, and wished to make that ancient town his goal. For me the scenery of Kent had a peculiar charm, and the bracing air of the North Sea was as the elixir of life. But to run down by rail to the seaside, shot through long tunnels and deep cuttings almost as swiftly as one of Jules Verne's heroes was shot to the moon, and to sit upon the pier at Dover, or the sands at Ramsgate, or the cliff at Margate every morning until the time came for my return to London, was not my way of compressing the utmost amount of enjoyment into the week or ten days to which my holiday extended. I love to turn my back upon the close streets of towns, to avoid even the dusty highways, and to explore the narrow tracks among the golden blossoming furs and broom or purple flowering heath of broad commons, to ramble through green lanes fringed with the feathery fern and fragrant with the scent of wild flowers, to thread the half-hidden paths through woods where furred or feathered fellow-creatures run or fly in freedom and the brick-and-mortar world is quite shut out, to wander by the banks of rivers far from towns with the sound of water rushing over a distant weir to lure me on, to follow the windings of a rocky coast where a new view is discovered as each bold point is rounded and the receding tide forms little pools in which tiny crabs lurk and narrow channels between seaweed for stewed rocks. It was my desire, therefore, to make a pedestrian tour through portions of the beautiful county of Kent, and my admiration of the genius of one of the greatest novelists of any age led me to suggest a visit to the numerous localities associated with incidents in Dickens's inimitable and immortal works. The idea was well received. The curate would have gone anywhere with congenial companions, and our friend only stipulated that we should not spend more than three days between London and Dover. A way we went, therefore, and were on the deck of a Gravesend steamer before the sun had reached the zenith, making the voyage performed by Pip and his companions in an open boat, and which terminated so disastrously for the man whose safety they were endeavouring to secure. As on that occasion it was a bright day and the sunshine was very cheering. The pool, more crowded with shipping than in Pip's day, and more turbid and offensive to the senses, was slowly threaded, and then our vessel made more rapid progress, and green hills began to be seen upon the right. By imperceptible degrees, as Pip records, as the tide ran out, we lost more of the distant woods and hills, and dropped lower and lower between the muddy banks, but the tide was yet with us when we were off Gravesend. Landing at the town pier, we ascended the narrow high street, leaving behind us ancient and fish-like smells, and skirting the eastern brow of Windmill Hill, descended the shady declivity of Sandy Lane to the southern foot of that eminence. Opposite the lower end of the lane is the commencement of a pleasant footpath, which we followed across green pastures to single Well Lane. And then, turning to the left, and passing some old cottages and a pleasantly situated little hostelery known as the Halfway House, found another footpath on the right, leading through hop gardens and arable fields to the village of Cobham, where Mr. Topman retired to conceal his woe from the world, and Mr. Pickwick made that famous antiquarian discovery, which rivals that of the inscription pronounced Roman by Scott's antiquary Jonathan Oldbuck, and so contrary-wise interpreted by the roving mendicant Edie Oakaltree. We passed the picturesque old church, pausing only to step into the little burial ground and peer through the windows at the monuments of the Cobhams, and went through the village, passing the clean and comfortable little ale-house called the Leather Bottle, which the great novelist has made famous as the retreat of Topman when crossed in love. Presently the extensive park spread out on our left, surrounded by wooded hills, which form a background of dark verdure to the noble hall. Dear grazed on the green slopes, or rested in the shade of the magnificent oaks and elms, of which, besides some fine clumps, there are avenues across the park in every direction. We sat down for a while on the greensward, just within the gates and under the shade of a far-spreading elm, and drew upon our memory-cells for the description of the walk of the pick-wicky ends across the park to recall to the world their lovelorn brother. A delightful walk it was, for it was a pleasant afternoon in June, and their way lay through a deep and shady wood, cooled by the light wind, which gently rustled the thick foliage, and enlivened by the songs of the birds that perched upon the boughs. The ivy and moss crept in thick clusters over the old trees, and the soft green turf overspread the ground like a silken mat. They emerged upon an open park, with an ancient hall, displaying the quaint and picturesque architecture of Elizabeth's time. Long vistas of stately oaks and elms appeared on every side. Large herds of deer were cropping the fresh grass, and occasionally a startled hair scoured along the ground, with the speed of the shadows thrown by the light clouds, which swept across the sunny landscape like the passing breath of summer. If this, said Mr. Pickwick, looking about him, if this were the place to which all who were troubled with our friend's complaint came, I fancy their old attachment to this world would very soon return. I think so too, said Mr. Winkle. And really, added Mr. Pickwick, after a half hour's walking had brought them to the village, really for a misanthrope's choice, this is one of the prettiest and most desirable places of residence I ever met with. In this opinion also both Mr. Winkle and Mr. Snodgrass expressed their concurrence, and having been directed to the leather bottle, a clean and commodious village ale-house, the three travellers entered, and at once inquired for a gentleman of the name of Tubman. To that place of refreshment where we had ordered dinner in passing, I and my companions returned, and passing through a door at the end of the passage, entered the room in which Tubman was found at dinner by his brother Pickwickians, a long, low-roofed room, furnished with a large number of high-backed leather-cushioned chairs of fantastic shapes, and embellished with a great variety of old portraits and roughly coloured prints of some antiquity. Under the roof of this old-fashioned house Dickens passed a night in the autumn of 1841, and the beautiful Park of Cobham was at all times one of his favourite resorts. On the particular occasion just mentioned he was returning from the annual Sojourn which, at that period of his life, he was accustomed to make at broad-stairs, when, meeting his friend Mr John Forster at Rochester, they passed a pleasant day at Cobham, sleeping at the leather-bottle, and on the following night at Graves End, after another day's rambling in this delightful neighbourhood. It seems probable, though the fact is not mentioned by the novelist's biographer, that they would not be two days in the neighbourhood without visiting Swanscombe Wood, where, according to tradition, the men of Kent made such a resolute stand against the troops of William the Conqueror on their march to London after the decisive Battle of Hastings, that the victorious Normans granted them the confirmation of their ancient rights and customs. This, according to the tradition, was the origin of the distinction, the memory of which has been preserved to the present day, between men of Kent and Kentish men. But there is another explanation, namely that the former term was applied to the original inhabitants and the other to later settlers in the county. All that seems certain is that the residents west of the Medway have always called themselves men of Kent, and their neighbours beyond the right bank of that river Kentish men. Swanscombe Wood, which I visited on another occasion, is of considerable extent, stretching northward to the village of that name, and eastward to the lane leading from South Fleet to Greenhithe. It consists chiefly of oaks, and just within its northern borders is a cave called Clapper Napper's Hole, associated with which are many legends and traditions. A green lane intersecting some small hop gardens leads from this part of the wood to the village, which is entered near the picturesque little church, said to be one of the oldest in Kent. This character applies, however, only to the lower part of the tower and portions of the walls, in which Roman bricks are mingled with masonry of Saxon origin. Four years later than the occasion to which reference has been made, Dickens drove to Cobham from Rochester, accompanied by his wife and her sister, and his friends MacLeese, Gerald and Forster. They visited the church, where there is an ancient wooden screen, an old round font, and several memorial-brasses of the Cobhams, and afterwards strolled through the park. During his residence at Gads Hill, this was one of Dickens's favourite walks, his fond recollection of which is evidenced in a passage of one of his letters from Lausanne, written in 1846. The green woods and green shades about here are more like Cobham in Kent than anything we dream of at the foot of Alpine passes. He would have come this way even more frequently than he did, could he have been allowed to take his dogs into the park. One of those faithful and intelligent companions of his rambles, Don, the Newfoundland dog, whose rescue of one of his pups from the Medway is recorded by Mr. Forster, is now in the possession of the Earl of Darnley, but his mate, Linda, lies under one of the magnificent cedars in the shrubbery at Gads Hill Place. Having refreshed and rested themselves at the leather bottle, the three pilgrims again entered the park, which they crossed towards the close of the afternoon, when the giant oaks and elms were throwing long shadows as walked the velvety green sword, and gleams of golden light played among the foliage and shimmered upon the grass beneath the spreading branches. Time did not permit the discovery of all the silver beauties of the park, among which are an avenue of four rows of limes, more than half a mile long, and a magnificent chestnut with a girth of thirty-two feet, known as the Four Sisters, from the Four Arms into which the enormous trunk divides before spreading out its branches. This fine tree stands about a mile from the hall, near the path leading to Knight's Place Farm. Emerging from the park at the lane leading to Chalk, we passed through more beautiful woodland scenery, the leafy shades of shorn wood, where the wood pigeons cooed among the topmost branches of the trees, and many small birds were twittering their last morsels of song, until tomorrow's sun should again prompt them to melody. On the right, beyond the wood, is the village of Shorn, the quiet picturesque churchyard of which was often the resting place of the great novelist at the close of a walk from Gad's Hill, which the heat of the day or some other restraining circumstance prevented him from extending. We reached the high road at the little village of Chalk, where Dickens passed his honeymoon, paying for the holiday with the money which he received for the first and second numbers of the Pickwick papers. Returning to Graves End through Milton, which has grown to be part of the town, we refreshed at the house at which we had arranged to pass the night, and then started again for a walk along the seaweed-strewn margin of the river, in the direction of those long reaches below Graves End between Kent and Essex, where the river is broad and solitary, where the water-side inhabitants are few, and where lone public houses are scattered here and there, in search of the scene of Magwich's fatal encounter with the Thames police. Threading the lane in which the custom-house stands, we passed the fort, which at that point commands the river and the flat expanse of Graves End Marsh. Crossed the canal which connects, or used to connect, the Thames with the Medway, and continued our walk along the side of the river, which, as Pip observed, turned and turned while everything else seemed stranded and still. Pip's description of the scene came forcibly to my mind as we followed the winding shore by the fast-fading twilight, with the blue-gray river and the level marshes before us stretching away to the Medway and the sea. For now the last of the fleet of ships was round the last low point we had headed, and the last green barge, straw-laden, with a brown sail, had followed, and some ballast lighters, shaped like a child's first rude imitation of a boat, lay low in mud, and a little squat-show lighthouse on open piles stood crippled in the mud on stilts and crutches, and slimy stakes stuck out of the mud, and slimy stones stuck out of the mud, and red landmarks and tide marks stuck out of the mud, and an old landing stage, and an old roofless building slipped into the mud, and all about us was stagnation and mud. We seemed to be traversing a region which had long years before been wrecked and submerged by an inundation, so slimy was every remnant of man's work, so ruinous and decayed every black structure, so melancholy the ripple of the tide upon strips of shingle, and the rustle of the half-dry sea-weeds that clung to mouldering piles and slimy masses of chalk. Not a human being was in sight, not a sound of human life was heard save our own voices and our own footfalls upon the uneven path. Presently a dark shapeless mass on the right, which we had sighted some time before, resolved itself into a black and ruinous mill. Many years must have passed since grist was taken to that tumbledown old building, which looked like a part of those seeming vestiges of a flood-wrecked world which we had passed before. The sails were broken, there were large openings in the boarded sides, the interior showed only decaying and cobwebbed joists. Just beyond this wreck stood a public house with the sign of the ship and lobster swinging before it, and a light, the only one visible all around us, shining from one of the lower windows. This, we decided, must be the house at which Pip and the escaped convict passed the night, preceding the frustration by the Thames police of the latter's attempt to get away from the country in a passing steamer bound for Hamburg. When I awoke, says Pip, the wind had risen, and the sign of the house, the ship, was creaking and banging about with noises that startled me. The curate and I lighted our pipes at this house, and having us attain that there was a foot-path across the marshes, if we could only find it in the obscurity that was now gathering over land and water, and having found it to keep the track and not walk into the canal, we began to retrace our steps. A sharp lookout enabled us to find the track through the marshy pastures and the little wooden bridge over the canal, and by the time we reached the by-road from Chalk to Hyam, the moon had risen, and the planet Silvery Light reconciled my companions to my proposition that we should turn up the narrow sandy lane leading to Chalk Church, instead of going direct towards the village. This was one of Dickens's favourite walks from Gads Hill, commencing at the lane leading to Hyam, turning off to the left at that village, and following the by-road to Chalk, which we had just crossed, and returning by the highway. A short walk brought us to the ivy mantled church, which stands about a mile from the village, as I have observed that a large proportion of the village church is in Kent, too. It is of great antiquity, and moss-grown gravestones several centuries old may be found in the churchyard. Over the entrance are several grotesque figures carved in stone, one of which represents an old monk sitting cross-legged, holding a drinking vessel, which may be supposed to contain some fluid more exhilarating than water. Dickens was much interested in this old fellow, and is said never to have passed the church without greeting the quaint figure with a friendly nod and a jocular remark. There was light enough to enable us to discern this figure, and to note the ancient and moss-grown gravestones half sunken in the earth, and in some instances almost concealed by the luxuriant herbage. There are some fields between the churchyard and the high-road, and having skirted these by the sandy lane, we turned to the right, and with pleasant talk of Dickens and his works beguiling the way, passed through Chalk and Milton into Gravesend. End of Chapter 1 Chapter 2 of In Kent with Charles Dickens This LibriVox recording is in the public domain, recording by Ruth Golding. In Kent with Charles Dickens by Thomas Frost Chapter 2 Our eyes opened next morning upon another bright day, and as, though the distance from Gravesend to Rochester, the predetermined goal of our second day's pilgrimage is only seven miles, there was much to be seen in that ancient city, we lost no more time before resuming our journey than was necessary to the satisfactory disposal of an excellent breakfast. Passing through Chalk once more, and turning to look at the little ivy-clad church when we had got a mild farther, we ascended a gentle rise with occasional glimpses of the Thames on our left and a charming panorama of Woodland scenery on our right. Gads Hill, now as intimately associated with the name of Dickens as with that of Shakespeare, was reached in about an hour, and those associations were held to justify a halt. Footnote Near the twenty-seventh stone from London is Gads Hill, supposed to have been the scene of the robbery mentioned by Shakespeare in the play of Henry IV, there being also reason to think that it was Sir John Falstaff of comic memory who, under the name of Old Castle, inhabited Cooling Castle, of which the ruins are in the neighbourhood. At a small distance to the left appears on an eminence the Hermitage, the seat of Sir Francis' head, and close to the road on a small ascent a neat building lately erected by Mr Day. History of Rochester, 1772. On the Hermitage estate there are now two houses called the Great Hermitage and the Little Hermitage, the former of which was the residence of Perry of the Morning Chronicle in the palmy days of that journal. The neat building lately erected by Mr Day was at one time supposed to be Gads Hill Place, but that supposition has since been found erroneous. End of Footnote The sign of the Sir John Falstaff swinging before a wayside hostelery was a suggestive of Shakespeare, as was the comfortable-looking Redbrick House called Gads Hill Place of Dickens. Gads Hill Place, which has been made familiar to the reading world by the woodcuts in Mr Forster's biography of the novelist, is a plain, old-fashioned Redbrick House of two stories, with a wooden porch and a bell turret on the roof. It was built in 1780 by a well-known character in this neighbourhood, an illiterate fellow named Stevens, who had been a hustler, and having had the good fortune to marry his employer's widow, became a brewer, made a fortune, and was elected mayor, or as he wrote it, M-A-R-E, of Rochester. At his death it was bought by a gentleman named Lynn, and leased to a sporting clergyman of the Regency Days, named Townsend, who was succeeded in its occupancy by another clergyman, the Reverend Joseph Hindle, then and still rector of Hyam, in which parish the house is situated. Dickens bought the house towards the close of 1856, and obtained possession in the following March, becoming, as he wrote to Mr Forster, the kentish freeholder on his native heath. A description which, while it evinced the exuberance of feeling which he experienced on becoming the owner of a house on which he had long had a longing eye, was not quite accurate, as though he had been brought up at Chatham, he was a native of Portsmouth. His first act of proprietorship was to hang upon the wall of the landing the following framed inscription illuminated by Owen Jones. This house, Gadshill Place, stands on the summit of Shakespeare's Gadshill, ever memorable for its association with Sir John Falstaff in his noble fancy. But my lads, my lads, tomorrow morning by four o'clock early at Gadshill, there are pilgrims going to Canterbury with rich offerings and traders riding to London with fat purses. I have visits for you all, you have horses for yourselves. Dickens made considerable additions and improvements both to the house and grounds. There was a shrubbery of which two noble cedars were conspicuous ornaments, but the high road divided it from the ground surrounding the house, and it was desolate and neglected. Dickens had a tunnel made to connect it with the front lawn and erected in its leafy seclusion the Swiss chalet presented to him by Mr. Fechter. I have put five mirrors in the chalet where I write, he wrote to an American friend, and they reflect and refract in all kinds of ways the leaves that are quivering at the windows and fields of waving corn and the sail-dotted river. My room is up among the branches of the trees and the birds and the butterflies fly in and out and the green branches shoot in at the open windows and lights and shadows of clouds come and go with the rest of the company. The scent of flowers and indeed of everything which is growing for miles and miles is most delicious. From Forster's Life of Charles Dickens. When the old Bridget Rochester was demolished the contractors presented the novelist with one of the balusters, which he set up on the back lawn and on the top of which he placed a sundial. Many interesting memorials were dispersed at his death, but the house remains, and after nine years' occupation by his son has lately passed into the possession of Captain Austin Budden of the 12th Kent Artillery Volunteers. Dickens' love of long walks through the lanes and the fields and the woods was a trait of his character with which his biographer has made all appreciative readers familiar. Note has been made in the preceding chapter of his rambles to Sean and Cobham and Chalk, and these were among his most favourite walks. But many were also the lunches and dinners of which he partook when friends were staying at the place in the cherry orchards and hop gardens of this beautiful county, and the excursions made to more distant spots, among which was Bluebell Hill near Ellsford and in the immediate neighbourhood of the remarkable druidical monument called Kitt's Coaty House. One of his longest pedestrian rambles only made in the autumn when the stubble could be crossed, commenced at the lane leading to Hyam, in which stands the blacksmith's forge from which the fur de joie was fired, equally to his surprise and gratification, on the occasion of his younger daughter's marriage with Mr. Charles Alston Collins, brother of Mr. Wilkie Collins. From Hyam he would tramp across the fields to Cooling, a village in the marshes, which Mr. Forster has made the unaccountable mistake of supposing to be on the opposite side of the medway. There are the ruins of an old castle there, and as the dreary churchyard and the adjacent marshes are the scenes of some of the most striking incidents in the story of great expectations, I was wishful to follow in the novelist's track, but time for bad, and the wish remained and remains ungratified. It is in the churchyard of Cooling that the story just mentioned opens, the first chapter introducing Pick to the reader as, when a boy, he sat there alone, oblique place overgrown with nettles, contemplating by the fading twilight the graves of departed members of his family, and the dark, flat wilderness beyond the churchyard, intersected with dykes and mounds and gates, with scattered cattle feeding on it, and the low-ledon line beyond, which marked where the river ran. Then the escaped convict, Magwitch, appears on the scene, and with fearful threats, coerces the frightened boy into procuring for him a file, from the workshop of his brother-in-law, Joe Gargery, with which to remove his fetters. The man and the boy part to meet again at various turns of the story, and then we have a description of the prospect across the marshes, which brings the scene as vividly before the mind's eye, as if we saw it in a picture. The marshes, Pip tells us, were just a long black horizontal line, then, as I stopped to look after him, and the river was just another horizontal line, not nearly so broad nor yet so black, and the sky was just a row of long, angry red lines and dense black lines intermixed. On the edge of the river I could faintly make out the only two black things in all the prospect that seemed to be standing upright. One of these was the beacon by which the sailors steered, like an unhooped cask upon a pole, an ugly thing when you were near it. The other, a gibbet, with some chains hanging from it, which had once held a pirate. A visit to Cooling, having been reluctantly on my part at least, voted impracticable. We trudged on towards Strewd, recalling as we went all the old stories about Gadshill that we had ever heard or read. The road which we were travelling formally round between thick woods, the haunt of the robbers, whose frequent depredations procured it the ill repute which it probably had in Shakespeare's time, and which it is known to have had for a century afterwards. John Clavel, in his recantation of an ill-led life published in 1634, mentions, Gadshill and those red tops of mountains where good people lose their ill-kept purses. In 1656 the Danish ambassador was robbed on Gadshill, and on the following day received a letter from the Marauders in which they informed him that the same necessity that enforced the Tartars to break the wall of China compelled us to wait on your excellency at Gadshill. Later false staffs and bardols these, for the letter indicates blamely that they had received an education which in those days only men of quality could attain. Twenty years later a highwayman named Nix or Nixon is said to have robbed a traveller on this part of the road at four o'clock in the morning, and ridden the same day to York, where at a quarter to eight in the evening he was playing bowls, as was afterwards deposed on his trial for the robbery. This story exceeds in its demands upon the elasticity of our power of belief the similar story which has been told of the highwayman Terping, who is said to have performed the feat of riding from London to York between the close of the afternoon of a summer day and eight o'clock on the following morning. Both performances must be regarded as apocryphal, however much the spirited narrative of Mr. Harrison Ainsworth, aided by the false glamour which he has thrown around his hero, may interest us. Such a task as covering nearly two hundred miles in sixteen hours, and in the case of the Kentish highwayman it would have been two hundred and twenty-six, is beyond the powers of any horse that ever was fold. When the possibility of the feat was rediscussed on the occasion of the equestrian task accomplished by Lieutenant Zubervitz in riding from Vienna to Paris in less than fifteen days, Mr. Harrison Ainsworth replied to those who questioned the possibility of the feat attributed to Terping, that Oswaldiston was of a different opinion, and that the squire was a good judge of such matters. But though that famous equestrian rode two hundred miles at Newmarket in ten hours and three quarters, he was not limited to any number of horses, and used no fewer than twenty-eight in the accomplishment of his task. So also, when in seventeen fifty-nine a gentleman named Shaftow rode fifty miles in less than two hours, the horse was changed ten times. And when, two years afterwards, he made a bet that he would find a man who should ride one hundred miles upon each of twenty-nine consecutive days, it being stipulated that the rider was not to have more than one horse upon each day, John Woodcock, by whom the arduous undertaking was accomplished, used fourteen horses. The course selected was from Hare Park to the Ditch at Newmarket, and then, across the flat, to the end of the Cambridgeshire course, and back to Hare Park, and it was marked out along its whole length with posts and lamps. Very different were the conditions under which Nixon and Terping are said to have performed their equestrian exploits. The roads were not so good in the seventeenth century as they are now, and Terping had not the advantage of lamps along the course of his nocturnal ride as John Woodcock had, and the moon would have been of little service to him where the road was overhung by trees. The strongest point of contrast is, however, that both the traditions concerning Nixon and the story of Terping's ride represent the distance as being ridden upon one horse. It happens that a similar feat was attempted in seventeen seventy-three by two gentlemen named Walker and Haye, who, having a dispute over their wine concerning the merits of their respective horses, agreed to decide it by riding from London to York. Walker's horse dropped, utterly exhausted, six miles from Tadcaster, but Captain Malcaster, who rode Hayesmere, reached Ooves Bridge at York and won the wager. The time, however, was forty hours and a half instead of sixteen, and the winner of the wager did not perform Terping's feats of leaping over donkey carts and turnpike gates by way of interlude. From this digression let us return to the pilgrims on the dusty road to Rochester. Dickens Hares in his paper on trams described a piece of Kentish road, which I think may be recognised in a section of the road which we were now travelling. I have my eye, he says, upon a piece of Kentish road bordered on either side by a wood, and having on one hand between the road dust and the trees a skirting patch of grass. Wild flowers grown abundance, and it lies high and airy with a distant river stealing steadily away to the ocean like a man's life. To gain the milestone here which the moss, primroses, violets, bluebells and wild roses would soon render illegible but for peering travellers putting them aside with their sticks, you must come up a steep hill, come which way you may. So all the tramps with carts or caravans, the gypsy tramp, the show tramp, the cheap jack, find it impossible to resist the temptations of the place, and they all turn the horse loose when they come to it and boil the pot. Bless of place, I love the ashes of the vagabond fires that have scorched its grass. On that strip of grass, blackened here and there with the ashes thus apostrophised, the novelist may have seen, and not improbably talked with, the originals of Dr. Marigold and Chops the Dwarf, and the pink-eyed Albino Lady, and Codlin and Short, and many more of the characters that figure in his stories. There ran through the whole of his kindly nature a strong vein of sympathy with all strollers of this class which reveals itself in many passages of his works, and in none more plainly than in the appeal of Sleary, the lisping circus proprietor, to Mr. Gradgrind, people must be amused. They can't always be a learning, nor they can't always be a working, they aren't made for it. You must have us, do the wise thing, and the kind thing too, and make the best of us, not the worst. But for another class of tramps which is numerously represented all through the summer upon this road, and upon all the main roads of the county, indeed, and of which there are many casual notices in David Copperfield and the mystery of Edwin Trude, he had no sympathy whatever. Of such is the ruffianly tinker who beats his wife and robs David Copperfield of his handkerchief. It may be that some of these vagrants work occasionally in a desultory manner, and by way of relieving the monotony of mendicancy, in the hayfield in June, in the cherry orchards in July, in the cornfields in August, in the hop gardens in September, but their favourite occupation is begging, for which purpose they assume the character of unfortunate artisans, or labourers in quest of employment and in the greatest distress. They have invariably either eaten nothing since yesterday, or sold their waistcoat to buy a bit of bread for their breakfast. Twenty years ago I met on this road, while walking from Gravesend to Rochester, a brace of rascals, who, asking my pardon for arresting my progress, told such a doleful tale of destitution and distress, journeymen-tailors they call themselves, and assured me they had never begged before, but were driven to it by hunger, not having yet broken their fast, that I bestowed sixpence upon them, and they went their way, invoking the blessing of heaven upon me for my charity. Returning to Gravesend a few hours afterwards, I saw the same men sitting at a table before the Sir John Fullstaff, with long pipes in their mouths, and a quart of ale before them, which one of them lifted on recognising me, calling in an impudent manner as I passed, while he had drank, old man. And at Gravesend I learned that these men lived during the summer by tramping backward and forward between that town and Strewd, telling to unwary travellers the story they had told to me. The gypsy tramp, whose tent and little tilted cart was formerly so constantly present a feature on the wastes of Kent and Surrey, is now an almost extinct variety of the nomad tribes who perambulate the roads of the south-eastern counties during the summer. The tent and the cart may still be seen on commons and in green lanes, but the owners will generally be found to be indigenous vagabonds, wandering from place to place, and obtaining a livelihood as hawkers or tinkers, and not veritable gypsies. The last specimens of the Romany tribe who came under my observation were two young women whom I saw three or four years ago, tramping over Thames-Ditton Common. And I have not seen any considerable assemblage of gypsies since the days of my youth, when, upon one occasion, I smoked a pipe with a party numbering between twenty and thirty persons, being the only house-dweller present. At that time I heard many stories of the gypsy Lees and Coopers, much of my early life having been passed in what was then the Hamlet of Norwood, and a very favourite resort of these nomads, but has long been absorbed into the southern suburbs of the Metropolis. The two Lees, father and son, who were hanged at horse-monger Lane on conviction of a petty robbery at Hirsham, notwithstanding a very general belief that they were innocent, and that the prosecutor's tricks was mistaken as to their identity with the offenders, were well and not unfavourably known to many respectable members of a generation which has passed away. An old inhabitant of the village of Streatham told me forty years ago that he and Adam Lee, the elder of those unfortunate men, had often played the fiddle together at balls given by farmers and others in that neighbourhood, and familiar in their mouths as household words with that generation, were the stories of the gallant measure of gold which Adam Lee was said to have given to his daughter on her wedding day, and of the guineas and seven shilling pieces which fashioned into buttons the old Romany wore on his coat and vest. A story very characteristic of the gypsy race used to be told, longer ago than I can remember, by a great uncle of mine, a Kentish farmer, concerning Tom Lee, the younger of the two men who suffered for the Hirsham robbery. One of the farmer's horses had been stolen, and almost as a matter of course in those days a gypsy was supposed to have been the thief. The farmer, meeting Tom Lee one day, expressed to him this suspicion, and perhaps hinted a little too broadly that Tom was not unlikely to have been the offender. Well, Master Sharp, said the gypsy, I didn't have the horse, but I know where he is, and if you like I'll steal in for you. At a later period gypsy Stevens, a quiet, well-conducted man, was a well-known figure at the Kent and Surrey fairs, at which he was a regular attendant with a drinking and dancing booth, of which his two dark-eyed daughters were not among the least attractions, though I never heard the slightest imputation upon their fair fame. Another gypsy celebrity of that day was Mother Cooper, maternally related to the pugilist of that name, and of considerable renown as a fortune-teller, in which character she was allowed the entree of the Bueller Spa Gardens, a fashionable resort of forty years or more ago at Norwood, where she became a husband-dweller, and died at an advanced age in very comfortable circumstances, as was often the good fortune of the gypsies of that generation. From these recollections, which arise naturally from reflection upon the ashes of the vagabond fires by the wayside, let us return to our pilgrims, who, telling old stories as they try John Wood, have by this time reached Frinsbury Hill. What a scene opens before us as we reach the brow of the hill, and begin to descend into the valley of the Medway. Before us, at the bottom of the hill, lies Strude, in which neighbourhood, which Mr Forster calls that prettiest, quaintest bit of English landscape, it was the original intention of Dickens to open the story of Bleak House. Beyond the old houses at our feet, Rochester Bridge spans the broad river, above the rocky right bank of which rises the massive ruins of the old Norman stronghold, which for ages has frowned upon the stream below. And beyond the ruins, backed by the clear blue sky, we see the towers of the yet more venerable cathedral. Such a view is to be found at few spots in England, and we feel, as we pause to gaze upon it, that it is of itself worth the pilgrimage. End of Chapter 2 Chapter 3 of In Kent with Charles Dickens This Librivox recording is in the public domain, recording by Ruth Golding. In Kent with Charles Dickens by Thomas Frost Chapter 3 We thought of David Copperfield, coming over the bridge at Rochester, foot sore and tired, on that journey to Dover, which was destined to have so strong an influence upon his future life, as we trudged over the handsome iron bridge, which had succeeded the old stone structure of former days. And as we paused upon it midway to look up the river, we thought of Mr Pickwick too, and I conjured up before my mental vision the figure of that estimable gentleman, his beaming countenance, his spectacles, and his amplitude of vest, leaning over the balustrade of the bridge, contemplating nature, and waiting for his breakfast. On the left of the spectator lay the ruined wall, broken in many places, and in some overhanging the narrow beach in rude and heavy masses. Huge knots of seaweed hung upon jagged and pointed stones, trembling in every breath of wind, and the green ivy clung mournfully around the dark and ruined battlements. Behind it rose the ancient castle, its towers ruthless, and its massive walls crumbling away, but telling as proudly of its own might and strength as when, seven hundred years ago, it rang with the clash of arms, or resounded with the noise of feasting and revelry. On either side the banks of the medway, covered with cornfields and pastures, with here and there a windmill or a distant church stretched away as far as the eye could see, presenting a rich and varied landscape rendered more beautiful by the changing shadows which passed swiftly across it, as thin and half-formed clouds skimmed away in the light of the morning sun. The river, reflecting the clear blue of the sky, glistened and sparkled as it flowed noiselessly on, and the oars of the fisherman dipped into the water with a clear and liquid sound, as the heavy but picturesque boats glided slowly down the stream. Just as Mr. Pickwick saw it then, we saw it now, and the reflection occurred spontaneously that Dickens must often have leaned over the bridge as we were doing, and gazed upon the castle ruins and the sunlit stream which they were then overshadowing. Mr. Forster relates that he met him here on his return from broad stairs at the end of September 1841, and that they passed the day and night here, and we find them here again with the novelist's wife and Miss Hogarth and McCleese and Gerald four years later when they visited the castle and watched his arms house, and went over the fortifications of Chatham having their quarters at the bull inn. At a later period of his life, during his residence at Gads Hill, Dickens often walked into Rochester, turning out of the high street through the vines, one of the old houses in which locality, called Restoration House, served him as a model for his picture of the gloom and desolation of Satish House in great expectations. Thence to Chatham lines round to Fort Pitt and across the bridge again. Our great novelist knew this city intimately, therefore, and the fruits of his knowledge of it are found not only in the story just named, and in the work by which he first made his mark on the records of English literature, but riper and more abundant in the last production of his genius, which was unfinished when he was suddenly snatched from life the mystery of Edwin Drewd, in which, though the many graphic sketches of local scenery are readily recognizable by any person who knows Rochester, its identity is thinly veiled under the name of Cloisterham. An ancient city, Cloisterham, and no meat-dwelling place for anyone with hankerings after the noisy world. A monotonous silent city, deriving an earthy flavor throughout from its cathedral crypt. A drowsy city, Cloisterham, whose inhabitants seem to suppose, with an inconsistency more strange than rare, that all its changes lie behind it, and that there are no more to come. A queer moral to derive from antiquity, yet older than any traceable antiquity. So silent are the streets of Cloisterham, though prone to echo on the smallest provocation, that of a summer day the sun-blinds of the shops scarce dare to flap in the south wind, while the sun-browned tramps who pass along and stare quicken their limp a little, that they may the sooner get beyond the confines of its oppressive respectability. This is a feat not difficult of achievement, seeing that the streets of Cloisterham City are little more than one narrow street by which you get into and get out of it. The rest being mostly disappointing yards with pumps in them, and no thoroughfare, exception made of the cathedral close, and a paved Quaker settlement, in color and general confirmation very like a Quaker bonnet, up in a shady corner. In a word a city of another and a bygone time is Cloisterham, with its horse's cathedral bell, its horse-rooks hovering about the cathedral tower, its horser and less distinct rooks in the stalls far beneath. Fragments of old wall, saints' chapel, chapter house, convent and monastery, have got incongruously or obstructively built into many of its houses and gardens, much as kindred jumbled notions have become incorporated into many of its citizens' minds. All things in it are of the past. Turning to the right we ascended the steep path leading to the ruins of the old castle, looking up at its massive walls and towers, and recalling to our minds the events of which it had been the scene. How it was three times taken and retaken in the troubleous times of the tyrant John, and how it was unsuccessfully besieged by Simon de Montfort, in the days when the barons were the champions of freedom as yet undreamed of by the trader and the artisan. And by that famous Kentish man the Dartford Tyler, in that later time, when crude ideas of liberty were beginning to ferment in the minds of the serfs. From the castle we soon turned, however, to the venerable edifice on our right, which still connects the past with the present, and which Dickens has so intimately associated with the mystery which he wove around the fate of Edwin Drude, and which the non-completion of the story left unsolved. Standing under the Norman archway of the cathedral, the curate contemplating its characteristic zigzag mouldings, the dim light within reminded me of the simile of Mr. Gruges, that it was like looking down the throat of old time. It was earlier in the day and earlier in the year than when Gruges went to meet Jasper, the chief chorister, whom we cannot help suspecting of being the murderer of Edwin Drude. But there was no difficulty in realising the scene before us, as it was beheld by him on that occasion, when old time heaved a mouldy sigh from tomb and arch and vault, and gloomy shadows began to deepen in the corners, and damps began to rise from green patches of stone, and jewels cast upon the pavement of the nave from the stained glass by the declining sun began to perish. Within the grill gate of the chancel, up the steps amounted loomingly by the fast darkening organ, white robes could be dimly seen, and a feeble voice rising and falling in a cracked monotonous mutter could at intervals be faintly heard. In the free outer air, the river, the green pastures, and the brown arable lands, the teeming hills and dales were reddened by the sunset, while the distant little windows in windmills and farm homesteads shone patches of bright molten gold. We entered the cathedral, and looked around upon the massive columns, the rounded arches, the stained glass windows, the oaken stalls, the sculptured tombs of bishops and abbots, the memorial brasses of barons and knights of the olden time. But the objects which chiefly attracted my attention were the quaint monument of the founder of Watts's charity, which forms a prominent feature of the wall of the south-western transect, and the brass tablet beneath it, which bears the following inscription. Charles Dickens, born at Portsmouth the 7th of February, 1812, died at Gadshill Place the 9th of June, 1870, buried in Westminster Abbey. To connect his memory with the scenes in which his earliest and latest years were passed, and with the associations of Rochester Cathedral and its neighbourhood, which extended over all his life, this tablet, with the sanction of the dean and chapter, is placed by his executors. As we stood in the nave, looking up at the low-art galleries and the sculptured corbels of the roof, I thought of that unaccountable expedition, as Dickens himself calls it, of Jasper, the opium-smoking chorister, and dirdles, the Sottish mason, which seems to have some unexplained connection with the unsolved mystery of Edwin Drude's disappearance. Drude and Neville arrived separately at the chorister's house in the cathedral close, but of the time and manner of their leaving it we are told nothing, except by the mouth of Jasper, who declares that his nephew and Neville, rival aspirants to the affections of Rosa Budd, left his house together, and that of Neville, who deposes that they afterwards walked along the river above the bridge, and then parted. Drude is not seen again, but Neville finds his watch and chain on the weir. It is on this night that Jasper and dirdles, in fulfilment of a previously expressed desire of the former, ascend the winding stairs which lead to the summit of the great tower of the cathedral. As they toil up the stairs, turning and turning, and lowering their heads to avoid the stairs above, or the rough stone pivot around which they twist, dirdles make such frequent applications to Jasper's brandy flask, from which the chorister is evidently disposed to allow him to imbibe as much as he pleases, that by the time they have got down again he is helplessly intoxicated. He lies down, sleeps heavily for a couple of hours, and awakes at daybreak to find himself shivering with cold, and Jasper pacing the stone pavement by his side. In the manner of the chorister's occupation during these two hours seems to be the solution of the mystery. The great tower, which rises on the north side of the choir, is named after Bishop Gundolf, who in the eleventh century built or rebuilt the nave. The ascent and the view from the summit, as seen by Jasper by moonlight, are thus described by Dickens. Their way lies through strange places. Twice or thrice they emerge into level, low-arched galleries, whence they look down into the moonlit nave, and where dirdles, waving his lantern, shows the dim angels' heads upon the corbels of the roof seeming to watch their progress. Anon they turn into narrower and steeper staircases, and the night air begins to blow upon them, and the chirp of a startled jack-door and the chirp of a startled jack-door, or frightened rook, precedes the heavy beating of wings in a confined space, and the beating down of dust and straws upon their heads. At last, leaving their light behind a stair, for it blows fresh up here, they look down on cloisterum, fair to see in the moonlight. It's ruined habitations and sanctuaries of the dead at the tower's base. It's moss softened red-tiled roofs and red-brick houses of the living clustered beyond. It's river winding down from the mist on the horizon, as though that were its source, and already heaving with the restless knowledge of its approach towards the sea. Is there not some legend connected with this tower? I inquired of a verger. The man looked at me steadfastly for a moment, then down at the pavement, and up at the roof, before he replied, as if he were questioning his memory as to whether he had ever heard of any such legend. Well, yes, sir, he at length replied. There is some mention in histories, I believe, of something that was supposed to be seen in the tower in the old times. A ghost, said the curate. Not exactly, replied the verger, unless there could be such a thing as the ghost of a hand. For I think the story this gentleman alludes to was about a hand that was supposed to guard a hidden treasure. An illuminated hand, was it not, said I. Something of that sort, sir, replied the verger. I don't suppose there ever was such a thing, or the treasure, either, but the story was, now I think of it, that the hand used to be seen in the tower on St. Mark's Eve, and that many attempts were made to discover the treasure which it was supposed the hand would point out to any person who could succeed in extinguishing the light. Was it ever discovered? inquired one of my companions. No, sir, replied the verger, smiling languidly as he shook his head. Nobody could ever blow out the light. Passing from the cathedral into the shady and sequestered close, where Roosevelt walked with Edwin Drude, we were reminded of Dickensian pictures at every step from every point of view. The sun was high in the unclouded sky, and there were no puddles on the uneven pavement, but the Virginia creeper was turning red upon the cathedral wall, and a few yellow leaves had fallen from the old elms. It was easy, therefore, to imagine the picture as described by Dickens at a later period of the year. The low sun is fiery and yet cold behind the monastery ruin, and the Virginia creeper on the cathedral wall has showered half its deep-bred leaves down on the pavement. There has been rain this afternoon, and a wintry shudder goes among the little pools on the cracked, uneven flagstones, and through the giant elms as they shed a gust of tears. Their fallen leaves lie strewn thickly about. There was Minor Cannon Corner. Minor Cannon Row is, I believe, the right name of the place where the Reverend Septimus Crisparkel lived. A quiet place in the shadow of the cathedral, which the calling of the rooks, the echoing footsteps of rare passers, the sound of the cathedral bell, or the roll of the cathedral organ, seemed to render more quiet than absolute silence. There, too, was the old ivy-covered stone gatehouse crossing the close, with an archway beneath it for the passage of the few persons who go that way, which the novelist made the abode of John Jasper, the opium smoker of Bluegate Fields, the sweet-voiced chorister of Cloisterham Cathedral, the uncle of Edwin Drude, and the passionate admirer of Rosa Budd. Dickens describes it as seen on an autumn evening, when, through its latticed window, a fire shines out upon the fast darkening scene, involving in shadow the pendant masses of ivy and creeper covering the building's front. As the deep cathedral bell strikes the hour, a ripple of wind goes through these at their distance, like a ripple of the solemn sound that hums through tomb and tower, broken niche and defaced statue in the pile close at hand. We failed to discover, or perhaps to identify, the nun's house, where John Jasper taught music, and Rosa Budd was a charming and particularly petted pupil, and which Dickens describes as a venerable brick edifice whose present appellation is doubtless derived from the legend of its conventual uses, standing in the midst of Cloisterham. Passing the ball in, the quarters of the pick-wickians, when they came down from London by the Rochester coach half a century ago to ruralise in pleasant Kent, as well as of Dickens, Gerald, Forster, MacLeaths and others, when they came to see the old castle and the older cathedral some years later, we went on to the celebrated arm's house, of which the novelist has given such a graphic description in one of the Christmas numbers of his periodical, and which was founded in the fifteenth century by Richard Watts, whose quaint monument we had seen in the southwestern transept of the cathedral. For six poor travellers who, not being rogues or proctors, may receive gratis for one night, lodging and entertainment and four pence each. Footnote. Like those of many old charities, the revenues of the poor travellers' house have far outgrown the requirements of the founder's purpose, amounting at the present time to between three and four thousand pounds per annum. This increase induced the trustees about a quarter of a century ago to submit to the Court of Chancery a scheme for the erection and endowment of an arm's house for ten men and ten women, and for empowering the trustees to contribute four thousand pounds towards the erection of a general hospital for the benefit of the city and neighbourhood, and an annual donation of one thousand pounds towards its support. The scheme received the sanction of the court and was carried out by the erection of a handsome block of arm's houses in the Tudor style of architecture on the Maidston Road at a cost of nearly ten thousand pounds, with two magnificent gateways which cost seven hundred pounds more. The hospital portion of the scheme was part of a plan for the reconstitution of St Bartholomew's Hospital, originally founded by Bishop Gundolf in 1078, for the benefit of lepers returning from the Crusades, but which had been many years in abents. A handsome general hospital was erected on the new road, and opened in 1863, and is maintained partly from the revenues of Bishop Gundolf's endowment, and partly from the annual donation from the funds of Watts's charity, aided by voluntary subscriptions. End of Footnote The question of our eligibility for the benefits of the charity was jocularly raised by the curate, and an application to the Master might perhaps have been defensible on the plea urged by Breslau the Conjurer, who, having announced while performing at Canterbury that he would give the proceeds of the last night's performance to the poor, divided the money among his musicians and assistants, who, as he told the Mayor, were as poor as any one in the city. The curate's proposition was not entertained, however, and we turned back into the High Street to dine, and take a parting look at the ancient city, which we then saw glowing in the sunlight, as Dickens has described it in those last pages of The Mystery of Edwin Drude, which he wrote in the Swiss chalet at Gadshill Place the day before he died. A brilliant sun shines on the old city. Its antiquities and ruins are surpassingly beautiful, with the lusty ivy gleaming in the sun, and the rich trees waving in the balmy air. Changes of glorious light from moving boughs, songs of birds, scents from gardens, woods and fields, or rather from the one great garden of the whole cultivated island in its yielding time, penetrate into the cathedral, subdue its earthy odour, and preach the resurrection and the life. The cold stone tombs of centuries ago grow warm, and flecks of brightness dart into the sternest marble corners of the building, fluttering there like wings. Those were the last lines the hand and pen of the great novelist ever traced, and the deep interest which the knowledge imparted to the description when I first perused it, was revived, as we took our last look at Rochester, before trudging into Chatham. End of Chapter 3 Chapter 4 of In Kent with Charles Dickens This LibriVox recording is in the public domain, recording by Ruth Golding. In Kent with Charles Dickens, by Thomas Frost. Chapter 4 When the Pick-Wickians had their headquarters at the Bull Inn, High Street, Rochester, their immortal leader entered in his diary a few brief remarks upon Strud, Rochester and Chatham, which evinced his close observation of everything which came under his notice in the course of his travels. The principal productions of these towns, he wrote, appear to be soldiers, sailors, Jews, chalk, shrimps, officers and dockyard men. The commodities chiefly exposed for sale in the public streets are marine stores, hard-bake, apples, flatfish and oysters. These characteristics are especially observable in walking through the streets of Chatham, of which we did considerable on that September afternoon and evening, in our search for localities associated with the early years of Dickens. And Mr. Pick-Wick might have added to them that the most numerous shops in all parts of that town are gin shops, beer shops, rag shops and second-hand furniture shops. In one street which we traversed, everything was covered by the street, every third house was devoted to the sale of intoxicating liquors, and we had no difficulty in finding the shop where poor little David Copperfield sold his jacket on the morning after he'd trudged weary and foot sore into Chatham, which in that night's aspect was a mere dream of chalk and drawbridges and masterless ships in a muddy river, roofed like Noah's arcs, and slept upon a sort of grass-grown battery overhanging a lane where a century was walking to and fro. Our first inquiries were directed to the discovery of St Mary's Place, otherwise the Brook, by which name the place is now generally known and designated. Here, in a small plaster-fronted, unpretentious-looking house with a small garden before it, Dickens passed five years of his childhood, his parents exchanging Chatham for the Metropolis when he was in his tenth year, when, as Mr. Forster says, the Kentish woods and fields, Cobham Park and Hall, Rochester Cathedral and Castle, and all their wonderful romance, including the red-cheeked baby he had been wildly in love with, were to vanish like a dream. But only for a time. The world knows now how fondly he cherished the memory of the scenes amid which his early years were passed, how often he visited them in afterlife, and how, in his manhood's prime, he returned to end his days among them, becoming a Kentish freeholder on what he had learned to regard as his native heath. From the Brook we strolled to Rome Lane, a portion of which still remains, but the house in which the future novelist and his sister Fanny attended a preparatory school had disappeared, having long before been pulled down for standing in the way of the Chatham and Dover Railway. Clover Lane, now improved into Clover Street, was the next place visited. But there also the demolisher had been at work, and the playground of Dickens' second school, to which he was transferred in his eighth year, had become a portion of the site of Chatham's station. This was the school kept in those days by the Reverend William Giles, Minister of the Baptist Chapel in St. Mary's Place, of whom Dickens retained a not ungrateful sense in after years that this first of his masters, in his little cared for childhood, had pronounced him to be a boy of capacity. And when, about halfway through the publication of Pickwick, his old teacher sent him a silver snuff-box, with an admiring inscription to the inimitable Boz, it reminded him of praise far more precious, obtained by him at his first year's examination in the Clover Lane Academy, when his recitation of a piece out of the humorist's miscellany about Dr. Bolas had received, unless his youthful vanity bewildered him, a double encore. Footnote from Forster's Life of Charles Dickens. End of footnote. In Chatham he found the originals of several of the characters who live deathlessly in his novels. The half-starved little drudge of the Bevis Marks household, whom Dick Swiveller, in the grand-delicant style proper to the perpetual chairman of the Glorious Apollos, calls the March and S, was suggested by a girl who was taken from Chatham Workhouse, when the Dickens family removed to London, to perform the menial service of their new home. Gaffer Hexham, who plies the ghastly trade of fishing corpses out of the Thames, and his son, the selfish brother of the loving and brave Lizzie Hexham—where did Dickens find her, I wonder—had their originals in a dockyard labourer and his son, whom Dickens mentions in a letter which has been given to the world by Mr. Forster, as the uneducated father in Fustian, and the educated boy in Spectacles, whom Leach and I saw in Chatham. Our search for brick-and-mortem mementos of the novelist's early years, having been attended with some amount of disappointment, and there being yet some available daylight, we found our way to the river, and strolled along its marshy banks in the direction of Brompton. There, as we turned towards the broad stream, which makes a very acute angle at the extreme point of our view southward, we saw the towers of Rochester Castle and Cathedral change from red to grey in the fading twilight, and, looking northward, the extensive marshes between the estuaries of the Medway and the Thames growing more dim and indistinct as we gazed. On such a spot as that whereon we stood was washed ashore, one day towards the close of the thirteenth century, the corpse of that drowned mariner whose finding and burial formed the first link in the remarkable chain of sensational incidents comprised in the legendary story of Sir Robert Shirland and his horse. According to the version of the legend which I followed, in repeating it to my companions as we strolled towards our quarters, the drowned sailor was cast ashore at Chatham, and interred in the burial ground of a little church dedicated to St. Bridget, of which, however, no trace can be found at the present day. Its red bricks and kentish ragstone cannot therefore be pointed out as mute evidences of the verity of the story, as Gaffer Hexham pointed to the jolly fellowship porters as proof of his statement that rogue riderhood had confessed to him that he had murdered John Harmon. It would seem at first sight that there could have been no connection by way of cause and effect between the burial of a drowned mariner at Chatham and the death of the knight of Shirland in the Isle of Sheppey some years afterwards. But according to the legend, St. Bridget, resenting the interment of the corpse in the burial ground of a church dedicated to her saintship, on the ground of the sailor having died without receiving priestly absolution from his sins, appeared to the clerk and commanded him to disinter it and throw it into the river. The saintly order was obeyed and the ghastly and unwholesome subject drifted down the river with the tide. For several days the horrible thing was carried backward and forward every flood and ebb between Sheerness and Jillingham Reach, but at length a strong breeze from the North West wafted it round the point and caused it to be washed ashore near the village of Minster, on the foreshore of the extensive domain of Sir Robert Shirland. On the unwholesome presence of the grim wafe becoming known to the knight, he gave directions for its burial in the parish churchyard. But the story of its rejection by St. Biddy had reached Minster and the priest refused compliance with the knight's order. Sir Robert insisted, ordered a couple of his serfs to dig a grave in the churchyard and lower the corpse into it, and went himself to see that the order was obeyed. The grave and the corpse were there, but not the priest. Irritated by his absence, for knights were not accustomed in those days to have their orders disobeyed, whether lawful or not, he sent for the priest, who presently stood beside the grave. Now do thine office, said the knight, was an ominous frown, or by the holy rude. He said no more, but completed the sentence with a gesture which left no doubt as to what the priest might expect if he continued obdurate. He again refused to offer a single prayer, and the knight, becoming purple with passion, lifted his right foot, and bestowed upon him a kick that precipitated him headlong into the grave. According to one version of the story, his neck was broken by the fall, another has it that he was buried alive. Be this as it may, the grave was hastily filled up, and Sir Robert Shirland returned to his castle. Why St. Bridget should have troubled her saintly head further about the matter is not very clear. Perhaps she felt that the interment of the corpse at Minster was a reflection upon herself, but feminine reasons lie too deep for discovery. The legend tells us only what her saintship did, namely that she complained to St. Augustine, who presented her grievance before the abbot of his monastery at Canterbury, the still existing magnificent gateway of which closes the vista of St. Paul's street. Then the abbot called upon the sheriff of Kent to set the law in motion against the sacrilegious knight of Shirland, and the sheriff summoned the posse comitatus, and presenting himself before the gates of Shirland Castle, commanded Sir Robert to surrender and be hanged. The knight ordered the drawbridge to be raised and the port colours to be dropped, and bade the sheriff go and be hanged himself. The representative of the law made a futile effort to vindicate its outraged majesty, but hammering at the gate had no other effect than to irritate the lord of the castle, who at length, finding that the noise disturbed his afternoon nap, saled out at the head of a dozen of his retainers, and laid about him with such hearty good will, with his two-handed sword, that the sheriff and his followers soon took to flight, and left him to the enjoyment of his siesta. Some time afterwards, having learned that the abbot of St. Augustine's had written to the pope, Boniface VIII, and that the papal legate in London had demanded that justice should be done upon the sacrilegious knight of Shirland, threatening excommunication in default, Sir Robert seems to have become uneasy in his mind as to the possible consequences. The appearance of the royal barge off the coast with the king on board brought the matter to a crisis. The knight mounted his horse and rode down to the beach, where, instead of dismounting and calling for a boat, he rode into the sea, and forced his horse to swim to the royal barge, which is said to have been anchored two miles from the shore. Perhaps he thought that the feat would win him the favour of the king. Perhaps it was only the freak of a man addicted to exploits of an uncommon character. What he urged in palliation of his offences is not told, but he received the royal pardon, and returned to the shore in the same manner as he had reached the ship. Then, as one version of the legend runs, he heard the croaking voice of an old woman, who gave utterance to a prophecy that his horse would someday be the cause of his death. But another version has it that, as he rode up the beach, he heard mutterings that such an exploit could only have been performed by the aid of the evil one, who was supposed to have taken possession of the horse. Whatever he was moved by, the night sprang from the saddle, drew his sword, and at one blow struck off the gallant steed's head. The date of this occurrence and the circumstances of the night's death are variously stated. As Philippot says, Sir Robert Tomb in Minster Church has become the scene of much falsehood and popular error, the vulgar having digged out of his vault many wild legends and romances. According to one account, the remarkable feet of equine notation was performed when Edward I was preparing for the invasion of Scotland, and it was on Sir Robert Shirland's return from the war that, landing on the beach with the remnant of his retainers, and coming upon the bleaching skeleton of the slain horse, he gave the sculler contemptuous kick, and in so doing wounded his foot with one of the bones. The inflammation of the wound produced mortification of the injured member, and the night died. But according to another version of the story, it was the French war for which preparations were then being made, and the night's death was caused by his horse while bearing him in the chase, stumbling at the spot where the skeleton of the horse lay, and throwing the rider from the saddle upon the skull, from which he thus received the fatal injury. How much of this story is truth, and how much fiction, it would now be very difficult to determine. Sir Robert Shirland was knighted by Edward I for his gallant conduct at the siege of Kailavarok Castle. His name survives in Shirland House, a mansion near East Church, on the right of the lane leading from Minster to Warden. His tomb is shown in Minster Church, and there can be no doubt that the horse's head sculptured above the recumbent figure of the warrior, and which also figures in the vein which surmounts the spire of the church, commemorates some memorable circumstance of his life. But we may be permitted to be sceptical concerning those portions of the story in which St Bridget and St Augustine figure. Footnote. Another brave Kentish soldier was knighted for like services at the same time, namely Sir John Hadlow, who derived his name from the village now called Hadlow, near Tumbridge, and whose castle and estate at that place afterwards passed into the possession of a family named Fane. End of footnote. Those who would see the remarkable monument, which either commemorates some such feat as tradition affirms to have been performed by Sir Robert Shirland, or, as Philippot suggests, has been the foundation upon which the legend has been built up, will find, in an excursion to Minster, much to interest them, irrespective of that which attaches to the knight's tomb. Minster may be reached either from Queenborough or Shea Ness by a walk of less than three-quarters of an hour, or by a walk of about two hours and a half, from Rainham, at which place there is a station on the railway from Chatham to Dover. Though it was not on the occasion of the Dickens pilgrimage that I explored some of the most interesting portions of the Isle of Sheppey, the reader will probably not object to accompany me in a ramble from the spot where the corpse of the drowned mariner was first washed ashore, to the churchyard where it ultimately found burial, and the ancient church which contains the tomb of Sir Robert Shirland. Opposite Rainham Church there is a lane, which, passing under the railway, follows the indentations of the creeks and marshes on the right bank of the medway. This amphibious tract extends from Gillingham to the Swale, and is intersected by numerous creeks and channels of the estuary, which, including the low islands, is more than twice as wide here as it is where the batteries of Shea Ness command its mouth. Between two of these creeks, and about a mile and a half from Rainham, is the village of Upchurch, famous for its deposits of Roman pottery, and the ancient cemetery on the ridge behind the marsh to the east of Otterham Creek, in which the potters and their families were interred. These deposits extend about three miles along the marshy banks of the river, and it seems, from their extent and nature, that the field of operations was changed as the clay became exhausted, and that the broken pottery was left in heaps on the ground. The remains of the remains of the heaps on the ground. After the abandonment of the works, the fields gradually became covered with alluvial soil, deposited by the tide, which afterwards scooped channels and creeks in it. The deposits of pottery consist chiefly of fragments, but none then a tolerably perfect specimen rewards the search, which, however, had better be left to the natives, as there is little chance of a find, without wading knee-deep in the mud, and exploring the banks below the water with a stick or a rake. The pottery is a firm and hard texture, and usually blue-black in colour, but articles of redware, ornamented with lines and raised dots in a variety of patterns, have occasionally been found. Traces of the buildings occupied by the potters, have been found in Halstow Marsh, especially near the Church of Lower Halstow, which the rambler comes upon soon after leaving the little village of Upchurch. An embankment, which has here been raised against the encroachments of the tide, abounds in fragments of Roman tiles and pottery, and many of these tiles have been worked into the lower portion of the walls of the little church, which stands upon a mound on the borders of the marsh. Beyond this place the road skirts the marsh for a short distance, and then runs by the side of the narrow channel, which divides it from Chitney Island until we approach the king's ferry. Though the scenery of this part of Kent does not present much variety of surface, or abound with the objects which constitute the beauty of an English landscape at a greater distance from the sea, it has a charm—I will venture to say a picturesqueness peculiar to itself. The vegetation of the marshes, the birds that wing their flight over them, are of species distinct from those of inland districts, and the alternations of land and water presented by the marshes, the low green islands and the channels between them, make a picture as different from the wooded hills far away to the right, as the aquatic plants and the soberly plumaged birds of the shore and the sea are from the shrubs and plants and bright-winged warblers of the woods, or as the murmuring of the tide as it washes against the clay banks and gurgles among the reeds and sedges, and the cries of the gulls and turns are from the song of birds and the hum of insects in the woods and the green lanes. But different as are the scenes and sounds of these marshes to those of an inland district, they have their peculiar charm for the rambler, if he be, as he ought to be, a lover of nature. The swale was formerly the ordinary passage for vessels sailing between the Thames or Medway and port to the southward, and as it is still deep enough for vessels of two hundred tonnes, its disuse may be attributed to the increased size of the ships of the present day, rather than to any diminution of the depth of water. It is now used only by barges and small coasting vessels, and the ferry has been superseded by the railway viaduct, which has been so constructed as to serve also for an ordinary carriage-road and footpath, while a drawbridge in the centre enables mastered vessels to pass under it. The Church of Aiwei is seen on the right as we approach the swale, and as we cross the viaduct, the distant mound of Tong castle may be discerned in the same direction. The low shore of Sheppey reached, the rambler proceeds in a northeasterly direction, parallel to the railway for a short distance, but on the right of it, and gradually diverging from it. A lane leading to the village of Minster turns to the right, where the road to Dull, Queenborough, and Dirty Sheerness bears to the left, and as our sense of smell begins to take cognizance of the saline odour of the North Sea, we enter the village and look about us for the remains of the Old Monastery. Of Sherland Castle no trace can now be found, but of the abbey there remain the gatehouse and the church, under the south entrance of which the distinguishing characteristics of a Norman arch are discoverable. Entering the church we find the tomb of Sir Robert Sherland, beneath the pointed arch on the south side of the castle, with the sculptured figure of a knight represented in the chainmail of the thirteenth century reclining upon it, with the hands clasped on the breast, the legs crossed, showing that he had fought against the Muslims, and his shield and banner beneath him. The sculptured head of a horse, do not forget to look for this, projects from the wall at the back of the recess in which the tomb stands, just above the recumbent figure of the knight, and it will be observed that it seems to be emerging from stony waves, as if in the act of swimming. Philippot thinks it probable that the horse's head was added to the monument, because the manner of Sherland had attached to it, among other privileges, a grant of the wrecks on the coast of Sheppey within its limits, which Grant was esteemed to reach as far into the water as at low tide a man can ride in and touch anything with the point of a lance. But this explanation is somewhat far-fetched, and though incredulity as to the knight's ride through the waves may be natural, neither of the generally received versions of the story, the supernatural features accepted, are, in other respects, unfeasible. Leaving the village of Minster, we proceed towards the beach, from which the brown alluvial cliffs rise to a height varying from eighty to a hundred feet. Under the combined operations of the waves, the brickmakers, and the searches for the fossils and the nodules of pirates embedded in the clay, they are rapidly diminishing. And though time has shown great exaggeration in the estimate of Sir Charles Lyle in 1834, that, calculating by the rate of destruction during the previous twenty years, the whole of the island would be washed over by the tide in another half-century, the face of the cliff has receded considerably to the south. On the occasion of my visit to this part of the coast, I had scarcely set my foot on the beach, when the roughness, exceeding even that of the shingle of Dover and Deal, drew my attention from the pea-green sea to the stones at my feet, and the remarkable appearance of one of them prompted me to pick it up. It was the petrified fruit of an extinct palm, similar to several species now abundant in the tropical regions of the Far East. Another and another arrested my gaze as I walked on. I could not step without setting my foot on some water-worn remnant of the organic life of a former period which the waves had washed out of the cliff. As the beach of this portion of the island is a favourite hunting-ground of geologists, and is, besides under a constant process of exploration by a rather numerous tribe of local collectors, who gather fossils the sale to the curious in such things, it is only by exceptional good fortune that the rambler can pick up a prime specimen among the wave-worn pebbles. Fossil fruits, fragments of the carapaces of tortoises and turtles, vertebrae of crocodiles and serpents, teeth of large sharks, may be discovered. But if rarer relics of the anti-Diluvian world are desired, and cannot be found upon the beach, recourse must be had to the aforesaid collectors, most of whom live in the cottages about Scapsgate, in the lane leading from Minster to the Royal Oak, near Hensbrook, and Warden Point. From these men may be obtained at moderate prices, bones of an extinct vulture, carapaces and plastrons of the tortoise, and skulls of an extinct species of fish. My ramble under the brown cliffs of this rich fossil-yielding shore was made at low water, and the inexperienced explorer will do well to ascertain the state of the tide before setting out, or he may be caught by it, and shut in between two projecting points with the rising sea on one side of him, and the crumbling and precipitous cliff on the other. It has been my fortune to be twice caught in this manner on the Kentish coast, one of which adventures will be told in another chapter. The little hamlet of Hensbrook is situated above a picturesque opening in the cliffs between Minster and Warden. The ramble between these villages may be made either along the beach, the state of the tide permitting, or by the road, the distance being about the same. Warden is situated just above the little promontory named after it, and in the midst of evidences of the continual encroachment of the sea upon the land. Twenty years ago an extensive landslip carried away a large portion of the churchyard, and the east end of the church is now on the verge of the cliff, and the entire edifice is threatened with destruction. Beyond Warden Point the coast trends to the south-east, and the cliffs gradually become lower, and at length sink to the low and marshy shore bordering the muscle bank. The rambler is advised, therefore, if he has reached the point by the beach, to return by the road, or in the alternative case, and if he does not wish to return to Sheerness or Queenborough, to turn from the road at the lane which skirts the western side of Shirland Park, and return to the viaduct over the swale by the by-road which crosses Bramble Dunne. End of Chapter 4