ortable coffee room, where our luncheon was neatly
served. We had learned by this time that all well regulated hotels in
the medium sized towns, and even in some of the larger cities--as large
as Bristol, for instance--have two dining rooms, one, generally for
tourists, called the "coffee room," with separate small tables, and a
much larger room for "commercials," or traveling salesmen, where all are
seated together at a single table. The service is practically the same,
but the ratio of charges is from two to three times higher in the coffee
room. We found many old hotels in retired places where a coffee room had
been hastily improvised, an innovation no doubt brought about largely by
the motor car trade and the desire to give the motorist more
aristocratic rates than those charged the well-posted commercials.
Though we stopped in Dartford no longer than necessary for lunch and a
slight repair to the car, it is a place of considerable interest. Its
chief industry is a large paper-mill, a direct successor to the first
one established in England near the end of the Sixteenth Century, and
Foolscap paper, standard throughout the English-speaking world, takes
its name from the crest (a fool's cap) of the founder of the industry,
whose tomb may still be seen in Dartford Church.

A short run over a broad road bordered with beautiful rural scenery
brought us into Rochester, whose cathedral spire and castle with its
huge Norman tower loomed into view long before we came into the town
itself. A few miles out of the town our attention had been attracted by
a place of unusual beauty, a fine old house almost hidden by high hedges
and trees on one side of the road and just opposite a tangled bit of
wood and shrubbery, with several of the largest cedars we saw in
England. So picturesque was the spot that we stopped for a photograph of
the car and party, with the splendid trees for a background, but, as
often happens in critical cases, the kodak film only yielded a "fog"
when finally developed.

When we reached Rochester, a glance at the map showed us that we had
unwittingly passed Gad's Hill, the home where Charles Dickens spent the
last fifteen years of his life and where he died thirty-six years ago.
We speedily retraced the last four or five miles of our journey and
found ourselves again at the fine old place with the cedar trees where
we had been but a short time before. We stopped to inquire at a roadside
inn which, among the m