d out of temper, by the
pursuit of political glory."--_Pall Mall Gazette_, March 1891. I am
since informed that Alfred is not a pastoralist, but in business, and
that Edward has not retired up to date.

CHAPTER III.

ROCHESTER CITY.

"The silent High Street of Rochester is full of
gables, with old beams and timbers carved into
strange faces. It is oddly garnished with a queer
old clock that projects over the pavement out of a
grave red brick building, as if Time carried on
business there, and hung out his sign."--_The
Seven Poor Travellers._

"The town was glad with morning light."--_The Old
Curiosity Shop._

MUDFOG, Our Town, Dullborough, the Market Town, and Cloisterham were the
varied names that Charles Dickens bestowed upon the "ancient city" of
Rochester. Every reader of his works knows how well he loved it in early
youth, and how he returned to it with increased affection during the
years of his ripened wisdom. Among the first pages of the first chapter
of Forster's _Life_ we find references to it:--"That childhood
exaggerates what it sees, too, has he not tenderly told? How he thought
that the Rochester High-street must be at least as wide as Regent Street
which he afterwards discovered to be little better than a lane; how the
public clock in it, supposed to be the finest clock in the world, turned
out to be as moon-faced and weak a clock as a man's eyes ever saw; and
how in its Town Hall, which had appeared to him once so glorious a
structure that he had set it up in his mind as the model from which the
genie of the Lamp built the palace for Aladdin, he had painfully to
recognize a mere mean little heap of bricks, like a chapel gone
demented. Yet, not so painfully either when second thoughts wisely came.
'Ah! who was I, [he says] that I should quarrel with the town for being
changed to me, when I myself had come back, so changed, to it? All my
early readings and early imaginations dated from this place, and I took
them away so full of innocent construction and guileless belief, and I
brought them back so worn and torn, so much the wiser and so much the
worse!'"

It would occupy too much space in this narrative to adequately give even
a brief historical sketch of the City of Rochester, which is twenty-nine
miles from London, situated on the river Medway, and stands on the chalk
on the margin of the London basin;