now and
then to peep at great holes where the rafters and
floors were once,--bare as toothless gums now,--or
to enjoy glimpses of the Medway through dreary
apertures like sockets without eyes; and, looking
from the Castle ramparts on the Old Cathedral, and
on the crumbling remains of the old Priory, and on
the row of staid old red-brick houses where the
Cathedral dignitaries live, and on the shrunken
fragments of one of the old City gates, and on the
old trees with their high tops below me, felt
quite apologetic to the scene in general for my
own juvenility and insignificance. One of the
river boatmen had told me on the bridge, (as
country folks do tell of such places,) that in the
old times, when those buildings were in progress,
a labourer's wages 'were a penny a day, and enough
too.' Even as a solitary penny was to their whole
cost, it appeared to me, was the utmost strength
and exertion of one man towards the labour of
their erection."

Dickens always took his friends to the Keep of Rochester Castle. He
naturally considered it as one of the sights of the old city. It was
equally attractive to his friends, for a curious adventure is recorded
in Forster's _Life_, in connection with a visit which the poet
Longfellow made there in 1842, and which he recollected a quarter of a
century afterwards, and recounted to Forster during a second visit,
together with a curious experience in the slums of London with Dickens.
The first of these adventures is thus described by Forster:--"One of
them was a day at Rochester, when, met by one of those prohibitions
which are the wonder of visitors and the shame of Englishmen, we
overleapt gates and barriers, and setting at defiance repeated threats
of all the terrors of law, coarsely expressed to us by the custodian of
the place, explored minutely the castle ruins." Happily such a
circumstance could not now take place, for, by the present excellent
regulations of the Corporation of the city of Rochester, every visitor
can explore the Castle and grounds to his heart's content.

On arriving at either railway station, Strood or Rochester Bridge, the
Castle is the first object to claim attention. Our attention is
constantly directed to it during our stay in the pleasant city; it is a
landma