Not far away was the Black Jack Tavern, where Jack Sheppard and all the great thieves of the day used to meet.  And bless me!  I have read so much about Jack Sheppard that I could fairly see him jumping out of the window he always dropped from when the police came.  After that we saw the house where Mr. Tulkinghorn, Lady Dedlock’s lawyer, used to live, and also the house where old Krook was burned up by spontaneous combustion.  Then we went to Bolt Court, where old Samuel Johnson lived, walked about, and talked, and then to another court where he lived when he wrote the dictionary, and after that to the “Cheshire Cheese” Inn, where he and Oliver Goldsmith often used to take their meals together.

Then we saw St. John’s Gate, where the Knights Templars met, and the yard of the Court of Chancery, where little Miss Flite used to wait for the Day of Judgment; and as we was coming home he showed us the church of St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields, where every other Friday the bells are rung at five o’clock in the afternoon, most people not knowing what it is for, but really because the famous Nell Gwynn, who was far from being a churchwoman, left a sum of money for having a merry peal of bells rung every Friday until the end of the world.  I got so wound up by all this, that I quite forgot Jone, and hardly thought of Mr. Poplington, except that he was telling me all these things, and bringing back to my mind so much that I had read about, though sometimes very little.

When we got back to the hotel and had gone up to our room, Jone said to me: 

“That was all very fine and interesting from top to toe, but it does seem to me as if things were dreadfully mixed.  Dr. Johnson and Jack Sheppard, I suppose, was all real and could live in houses; but when it comes to David Copperfields and Lady Dedlocks and little Miss Flites, that wasn’t real and never lived at all, they was all talked about in just the same way, and their favorite tramping grounds pointed out, and I can’t separate the real people from the fancy folk, if we’ve got to have the same bosom heaving for the whole of them.”

“Jone,” said I, “they are all real, every one of them.  If Mr. Dickens had written history I expect he’d put Lady Dedlock and Miss Flite and David Copperfield into it; and if the history writers had written stories they would have been sure to get Dr. Johnson and Lord Bacon and Peter the Great into them; and the people in the one kind of writing would have been just as real as the people in the other.  At any rate, that’s the way they are to me.”

On the Monday after our landmark expedition with Mr. Poplington, which I shall never forget, Jone settled up his business matters, and the next day we started for Buxton and the rheumatism baths.  To our great delight Mr. Poplington said he would go with us, not all the way, for he wanted to stop at a little place called Rowsley, where he would stay for a few days and then go on to Buxton; but we was very glad to have him with us during the greater part of the way, and we all left the hotel in the same four-wheeler.