e words,
with what wonderful vividness they bring back the very spot on which we
stood when he said he meant to make it the scene of the opening of
this story--Cooling Castle ruins and the desolate Church, lying out
among the marshes seven miles from Gad's Hill!"

[Illustration: Cooling Church.]

Beyond where the river runs to the sea, we conjure up the chase and
recapture of Pip's convict, while poor Pip himself, assisted by his
friend Herbert Pocket, is straining every nerve to get him away. As
illustrative of the wonderfully careful way in which Dickens did all his
work, we also read in Forster's _Life_:--

"To make himself sure of the actual course of a boat in such
circumstances, and what possible incidents the adventure might have,
Dickens hired a steamer for the day from Blackwall to Southend. Eight or
nine friends, and three or four members of his family, were on board,
and he seemed to have no care, the whole of that summer day (22nd of
May, 1861), except to enjoy their enjoyment and entertain them with his
own in shape of a thousand whims and fancies; but his sleepless
observation was at work all the time, and nothing had escaped his keen
vision on either side of the river. The fifteenth chapter of the third
volume is a masterpiece."

Speaking generally of this fascinating story, which possesses a
thousand-fold greater interest to us now we visit the country there
described (not formerly very accessible, but now readily approached by
the railway from Gravesend to Sheerness, alighting at Cliffe, the
nearest station to Cooling), Forster says:--

"It may be doubted if Dickens could better have established his right to
the front rank among novelists claimed for him, than by the ease and
mastery with which, in these two books of _Copperfield_ and _Great
Expectations_, he kept perfectly distinct the two stories of a boy's
childhood, both told in the form of autobiography."

The marshes are also alluded to twice in _Bleak House_--first, in
chapter one--"Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights;" and
secondly, in the twenty-sixth chapter, in the dialogue between Trooper
George and his odd but kind-hearted attendant Phil Squod, the original
of which, by the bye, was a Chatham character.

"'And so, Phil,' says George of the shooting
gallery, after several turns in silence; 'you were
dreaming of the country last night.'

"Phil, by the bye, said as much, in a t