“The hand of him here torpid lies,
    That drew the essential form of grace;
    Here closed in death the attentive eyes
    That saw the manners in the face.”

Every day we had out-of-door games, such as “Bowls,” “Aunt Sally,” and the like, Dickens leading off with great spirit and fun.  Billiards came after dinner, and during the evening we had charades and dancing.  There was no end to the new divertisements our kind host was in the habit of proposing, so that constant cheerfulness reigned at Gad’s Hill.  He went into his work-room, as he called it, soon after breakfast, and wrote till twelve o’clock; then he came out, ready for a long walk.  The country about Gad’s Hill is admirably adapted for pedestrian exercise, and we went forth every day, rain or shine, for a stretcher.  Twelve, fifteen, even twenty miles were not too much for Dickens, and many a long tramp we have had over the hop-country together.  Chatham, Rochester, Cobham Park, Maidstone,—­anywhere, out under the open sky and into the free air!  Then Dickens was at his best, and talked.  Swinging his blackthorn stick, his lithe figure sprang forward over the ground, and it took a practised pair of legs to keep alongside of his voice.  In these expeditions I heard from his own lips delightful reminiscences of his early days in the region we were then traversing, and charming narratives of incidents connected with the writing of his books.

Dickens’s association with Gad’s Hill, the city of Rochester, the road to Canterbury, and the old cathedral town itself, dates back to his earliest years.  In “David Copperfield,” the most autobiographic of all his books, we find him, a little boy, (so small, that the landlady is called to peer over the counter and catch a glimpse of the tiny lad who possesses such “a spirit,”) trudging over the old Kent Road to Dover.  “I see myself,” he writes, “as evening closes in, coming over the bridge at Rochester, footsore and tired, and eating bread that I had bought for supper.  One or two little houses, with the notice, ’Lodgings for Travellers’ hanging out, had tempted me; but I was afraid of spending the few pence I had, and was even more afraid of the vicious looks of the trampers I had met or overtaken.  I sought no shelter, therefore, but the sky; and toiling into Chatham,—­which in that night’s aspect is a mere dream of chalk, and drawbridges, and mastless ships in a muddy river, roofed like Noah’s arks,—­crept, at last, upon a sort of grass-grown battery overhanging a lane, where a sentry was walking to and fro.  Here I lay down near a cannon; and, happy in the society of the sentry’s footsteps, though he knew no more of my being above him than the boys at Salem House had known of my lying by the wall, slept soundly until morning,” Thus early he noticed “the trampers” which infest the old Dover Road, and observed them in their numberless gypsy-like variety; thus early he looked lovingly on Gad’s Hill Place, and wished it might be his own, if he ever grew up to be a man.  His earliest memories were filled with pictures of the endless hop-grounds and orchards, and the little child “thought it all extremely beautiful!”