One of the weirdest neighborhoods to Gad’s Hill, and one of those most closely associated with Dickens, is the village of Cooling.  A cloudy day proved well enough for Cooling; indeed, was undoubtedly chosen by the adroit master of hospitalities as being a fitting sky to show the dark landscape of “Great Expectations.”  The pony-carriage went thither to accompany the walking party and carry the baskets; the whole way, as we remember, leading on among narrow lanes, where heavy carriages were seldom seen.  We are told in the novel, “On every rail and gate, wet lay clammy, and the marsh mist was so thick that the wooden finger on the post directing people to our village—­a direction which they never accepted, for they never came there—­was invisible to me until I was close under it.”  The lanes certainly wore that aspect of never being accepted as a way of travel; but this was a delightful recommendation to our walk, for summer kept her own way there, and grass and wild-flowers were abundant.  It was already noon, and low clouds and mists were lying about the earth and sky as we approached a forlorn little village on the edge of the wide marshes described in the opening of the novel.  This was Cooling, and passing by the few cottages, the decayed rectory, and straggling buildings, we came at length to the churchyard.  It took but a short time to make us feel at home there, with the marshes on one hand, the low wall over which Pip saw the convict climb before he dared to run away; “the five little stone lozenges, each about a foot and a half long, ... sacred to the memory of five little brothers, ...to which I had been indebted for a belief that they all had been born on their backs, with their hands in their trousers pockets, and had never taken them out in this state of existence";—­all these points, combined with the general dreariness of the landscape, the far-stretching marshes, and the distant sea-line, soon revealed to us that this was Pip’s country, and we might momently expect to see the convict’s head, or to hear the clank of his chain, over that low wall.

We were in the churchyard now, having left the pony within eye-shot, and taken the baskets along with us, and were standing on one of those very lozenges, somewhat grass-grown by this time, and deciphering the inscriptions.  On tiptoe we could get a wide view of the marsh, with, the wind sweeping in a lonely limitless way through the tall grasses.  Presently hearing Dickens’s cheery call, we turned to see what he was doing.  He had chosen a good flat gravestone in one corner (the corner farthest from the marsh and Pip’s little brothers and the expected convict), had spread a wide napkin thereupon after the fashion of a domestic dinner-table, and was rapidly transferring the contents of the hampers to that point.  The horrible whimsicality of trying to eat and make merry under these deplorable circumstances, the tragic-comic character of the scene, appeared to take him by surprise.