nd Jingle, and Copperfield and his friend Steerforth.

To-day one journeys, by a not very progressive or up-to-date railway, by
much the same route as did Mr. Pickwick and his friends, and reaches the
Medway at Strood and Rochester through a grime and gloom which hardly
existed in Dickens' time to the same compromising extent that it does
to-day. Bricks, mortar, belching chimneys, and roaring furnaces line the
route far into the land of hops.

Twenty miles have passed before those quiet scenes of Kentish life, which
imagination has led one to expect, are in the least apparent. The route
_via_ the river towns of Woolwich, Erith, Gravesend, and Dartford, or
_via_ Lee, Eltham, and Bexley, is much the same, and it is only as the
train crosses the Medway at Strood--the insignificant and uninteresting
suburb of Rochester--that any environment of a different species from that
seen in London itself is to be recognized. The ancient city of Rochester,
with its overgrown and significantly busy dockyard appendage of Chatham,
is indicative of an altogether different _raison d'etre_ from what one has
hitherto connected the scenes of Dickens' stories.

Kent as a whole, even the Kent of Dickens, would require much time to
cover, as was taken by the "Canterbury" or even the "Pickwickian"
pilgrims, but a mere following, more or less rapidly, of the Dover Road,
debouching therefrom to Broadstairs, will give a vast and appreciative
insight into the personal life of Dickens as well as the novels whose
scenes are here laid.

The first shrine of moment _en route_ would be the house at Chalk, where
Dickens spent his honeymoon, and lived subsequently at the birth of his
son, Charles Dickens, the younger. Gad's Hill follows closely, thence
Rochester and Chatham. The pond on which the "Pickwickians" disported
themselves on a certain occasion, when it was frozen, is still pointed out
at Rochester, and "The Leather Bottle" at Cobham, where Mr. Pickwick and
Mr. Winkle made inquiries for "a gentleman by the name of Tupman," is a
very apparent reality; and with this one is well into the midst of the
Kent country, made famous by Charles Dickens.

Aside from Dickens' later connection with Rochester, or, rather, Gad's
Hill Place, there is his early, and erstwhile happy, life at Chatham to
be reckoned with. Here, his father being in employment at the dockyard,
the boy first went to school, having been religiously and devotedly put
through the early st