was no end to the new divertisements our kind host was in the habit of
proposing, so that constant cheerfulness reigned at Gad's Hill. He went
into his work-room, as he called it, soon after breakfast, and wrote
till twelve o'clock; then he came out, ready for a long walk. The
country about Gad's Hill is admirably adapted for pedestrian exercise,
and we went forth every day, rain or shine, for a stretcher. Twelve,
fifteen, even twenty miles were not too much for Dickens, and many a
long tramp we have had over the hop-country together. Chatham,
Rochester, Cobham Park, Maidstone,--anywhere, out under the open sky and
into the free air! Then Dickens was at his best, and talked. Swinging
his blackthorn stick, his lithe figure sprang forward over the ground,
and it took a practised pair of legs to keep alongside of his voice. In
these expeditions I heard from his own lips delightful reminiscences of
his early days in the region we were then traversing, and charming
narratives of incidents connected with the writing of his books.

Dickens's association with Gad's Hill, the city of Rochester, the road
to Canterbury, and the old cathedral town itself, dates back to his
earliest years. In "David Copperfield," the most autobiographic of all
his books, we find him, a little boy, (so small, that the landlady is
called to peer over the counter and catch a glimpse of the tiny lad who
possesses such "a spirit,") trudging over the old Kent Road to Dover. "I
see myself," he writes, "as evening closes in, coming over the bridge at
Rochester, footsore and tired, and eating bread that I had bought for
supper. One or two little houses, with the notice, 'Lodgings for
Travellers' hanging out, had tempted me; but I was afraid of spending
the few pence I had, and was even more afraid of the vicious looks of
the trampers I had met or overtaken. I sought no shelter, therefore, but
the sky; and toiling into Chatham,--which in that night's aspect is a
mere dream of chalk, and drawbridges, and mastless ships in a muddy
river, roofed like Noah's arks,--crept, at last, upon a sort of
grass-grown battery overhanging a lane, where a sentry was walking to
and fro. Here I lay down near a cannon; and, happy in the society of the
sentry's footsteps, though he knew no more of my being above him than
the boys at Salem House had known of my lying by the wall, slept soundly
until morning," Thus early he noticed "the trampers" which infest the
old Dover Road, a