the George Inn (not Sam Weller's inn), being a large open yard and called George Yard, at the farther end of which is the George and Vulture Tavern having a passage in St. Michael's Alley.' "And now listen to this:

"Here in 1652 was set up the first Coffee House in London, in St. Michael's Alley, Cornhill, first known as Pasqua Rosee Inn but before and long since as the George and Vulture.'

"Oh! It's some inn, I tell you, or was. Addison came here, and so did Swift and Defoe, who wrote 'Robinson Crusoe,' and Gray, who wrote the 'Elegy'; old Pepys, who wrote the 'Diary'; John Wilkes, Hogarth, and later on almost every man of prominence in his time who loved a good dinner. A great old inn in its day, and would be now if they'd get over the idea of making money and settle down to a quiet life with a mug and a rubber of whist and a long-stemmed pipe.

I nodded assent, thanked him for his running commentary, waited a moment in the hope that he would add the Pickwick Club to the list of its distinguished patrons and, finding that he was entirely engrossed in relighting his pipe, jogged his memory with the inquiry:

"And how about Mr. Dickens? He has helped some, hasn't he?"

"Oh, yes, no doubt of it; light kind of fiction, you know, but it all counts in advertising, and

"But the Pickwick party did start from here, didn't it?"

I am not accustomed to having my dolls disembowelled before my eyes not without a protest of some kind.

His head went back with a jerk and a laugh rang out.

"Still at it, are you?" he cried. "Start from here? Of course they did. I'm not certain from which door; not from the one you came in and not from the one I'll go out, if this part of London was built up as thick then as it is now. Maybe the book will tell you and maybe it won't you can read it later on. The fellow who wrote it probably didn't know, so he hasn't said. He's got the fiction part of it all right and the room in which Winkle slept, and the landlord, so I am told, still keeps the sheets and pillow-cases in lavender and he has locked up in his safe the pen and ink-well that Winkle used in writing his letter to his father. He'll show it to you if you ask him—that is, he would have shown it to you had you asked him in time. He's dead now been dead over fifty years. Well, I must be going. I'm in the

phosphate business. Be glad to see you any time you drop in. There's my card. Thank you, I'll smoke it to-night, after dinner. Don't forget to go to Rochester. You'll go crazy there. The Bull is just your kind," and he closed the door behind him.

CHAPTER V

THE BULL AT ROCHESTER, WHERE DOCTOR SLAMMER CHALLENGED MR. JINGLE AND MR. WINKLE WAS PUT TO BED

JOT to have dropped one's luggage at The

NOT

Bull, in Rochester, is to be counted outside the pale of good society. Half the nobility of England, to say nothing of distinguished commoners from every part of the Empire, have enjoyed its hospitality; and this dates a long way back, as can be seen from the many framed autograph letters addressed to Mr. Birch, once proprietor of the Inn.

In 1836 Their Royal Highnesses the Duchess of Kent and her daughter the Princess Victoria, afterward England's Queen, with their suite changed horses here on their way to Dartforth; "Each post boy to receive 6d. per mile, IIS. to be paid per pair for horses, including hostlers and toll gates."

In 1837 His Serene Highness the Prince of Leiningen ordered "two setts of four horses,

the Best with careful drivers to change at the Rose Inn, Sitting Bourne."

On March 9 (no year) Mr. Tennyson ordered and occupied "a well-aired bed room (with dressing room) also a well-aired Sitting Room and fires lighted."

And in June, 1913, no less a person than the humble scribe tucked his legs under one of the mahoganies of the coffee-room and stretched them to their full length in the high poster on the second floor back.

As to the hosts of the shadowy and intangible, Dickens himself says that up these very stairs sprinted the volatile Mr. Alfred Jingle on his way to the Assembly Ball, given on the next floor, where he danced and made love to Doctor Slammer's buxom widow; that down this same flight roared the doctor, thirsting for Mr. Jingle's blood; and that around this same coffee-room fumed Slammer's belligerent second, loaded with instructions which he was to fire pointblank at Mr. Nathaniel Winkle, or some one representing that bibulous and forgetful gentleman, the moment he came in sight.

Strange to say, in The Bull and its environs few changes have taken place since Mr. Dickens described them, either in its surroundings, its interiors, nor yet in its appointments. The