Hospital; and it lived also in the child's memory that they had come
away from Portsea in the snow. Their home, shortly after, was again
changed, on the elder Dickens being placed upon duty in Chatham
dockyard; and the house where he lived in Chatham, which had a
plain-looking whitewashed plaster front and a small garden before and
behind, was in St. Mary's Place, otherwise called the Brook, and next
door to a Baptist meeting-house called Providence Chapel, of which a Mr.
Giles, to be presently mentioned, was minister. Charles at this time
was between four and five years old;[1] and here he stayed till he was
nine. Here the most durable of his early impressions were received; and
the associations that were around him when he died were those which at
the outset of his life had affected him most strongly.

The house called Gadshill Place stands on the strip of highest ground in
the main road between Rochester and Gravesend. Often had we traveled
past it together, years and years before it became his home, and never
without some allusion to what he told me when first I saw it in his
company, that amid the recollections connected with his childhood it
held always a prominent place, for, upon first seeing it as he came from
Chatham with his father, and looking up at it with much admiration, he
had been promised that he might himself live in it, or in some such
house, when he came to be a man, if he would only work hard enough.
Which for a long time was his ambition. The story is a pleasant one, and
receives authentic confirmation at the opening of one of his essays on
traveling abroad, when as he passes along the road to Canterbury there
crosses it a vision of his former self:

"So smooth was the old high-road, and so fresh were the horses, and so
fast went I, that it was midway between Gravesend and Rochester, and the
widening river was bearing the ships, white-sailed or black-smoked, out
to sea, when I noticed by the wayside a very queer small boy.

"'Holloa!' said I to the very queer small boy, 'where do you live?'

"'At Chatham,' says he.

"'What do you do there?' says I.

"'I go to school,' says he.

"I took him up in a moment, and we went on. Presently, the very queer
small boy says, 'This is Gadshill we are coming to, where Falstaff went
out to rob those travelers, and ran away.'

"'You know something about Falstaff, eh?' said I.

"'All about him,' said the very queer small boy. 'I am old (I am nine),
and