have always, in passing, looked
to see if it was to be sold or let, and it has never been to me like any
other house, and it has never changed at all.' We came back to town and my
friend went out to dinner. Next morning he came to me in great excitement,
and said, 'It is written that you are to have that house at Gad's Hill.
The lady I had allotted to take down to dinner yesterday began to speak of
that neighbourhood. "You know it?" I said; "I have been there to-day."
"Oh, yes," she said, "I know it very well; I was a child there in the
house they call Gad's Hill Place. My father was the rector, and lived
there many years. He has just died, has left it to me, and I want to sell
it." So,' says the sub-editor, 'you must buy it, now or never!' I did, and
hope to pass next summer there."

It is difficult to regard the numerous passages descriptive of places in
Dickens' books without reverence and admiration. The very atmosphere
appears, by his pen, to have been immortalized.

Even the incoherences of Jingle have cast a new cloak of fame over
Rochester's Norman Cathedral and Castle!

"'Ah! fine place, glorious pile--frowning walls--tottering arches--dark
nooks--crumbling staircases. Old Cathedral too--earthy smell--pilgrims'
feet wore away the old steps--little Saxon doors--confessionals like
money-takers' boxes at theatres--queer customers those monks--Popes and
Lord Treasurers and all sorts of fellows, with great red faces and broken
noses, turning up every day--buff jerkins too--matchlocks--sarcophagus--
fine place--old legends too--strange stories: capital,' and the stranger
continued to soliloquize until they reached the Bull Inn, in the High
Street, where the coach stopped."

[Illustration: DICKENS' STUDY AT GAD'S HILL PLACE.

_From a painting by Luke Fildes, R. A._]

A further description of the Cathedral by Dickens is as follows:

"A certain awful hush pervades the ancient pile, the cloisters, and the
churchyard, after dark, which not many people care to encounter. The cause
of this is not to be found in any local superstition that attaches to the
precincts, but it is to be sought in the innate shrinking of dust with the
breath of life in it from dust out of which the breath of life has passed;
also in the ... reflection, 'If the dead do, under any circumstances,
become visible to the living, these are such likely surroundings for the
purpose that I, the living, will get out of them as soon as I can.'"

W