GAD'S HILL 87 



inns, each claiming to be a " half-way house " ; 

 a lane that leads off to the right, towards the village 

 of Shorne ; a windmill, without its sails, standing on 

 the brow of a singular hill ; these, together with the 

 great numbers of men and women working in the 

 fields, are all the noticeable features of the road 

 until one comes up the long, gradual ascent to the 

 top of Gad's Hill. 



Gad's Hill is at first distinctly disappointing ; 

 perhaps all places of pilgrimage must on acquaintance 

 be necessarily less satisfactory than a lively fancy 

 has painted them. How very often, indeed, does not 

 one exclaim on standing before world-famed sites, 

 '' Is this all ? " 



The stranger comes unawares upon Gad's Hill. 

 The ascent is so gradual that he is quite unprepared 

 for the shock that awaits him when he comes in sight 

 of a house and two spreading cedars that can scarce 

 be other than Charles Dickens' home. He has seen 

 them pictured so often that there can surely be no 



mistake ; and yet He feels cheated. Is this, 



then, the famous hill where travellers were wont to be 

 robbed ? Is this the place referred to by that 

 seventeenth-century robber turned litterateur, John 

 Clavell, who, in his " Recantation of an Ill-led Life," 

 speaks so magniloquently of — 



Gad's Hill, and those 

 Red tops of mountains, where good people lose 

 Their ill kept purses. 



Was it here, then, upon this paltry pimple of a hill 

 that Falstaff and Prince Hal, Poins and the rest of 

 them, robbed the merchants, the franklins, and the 

 flea-bitten carriers, who, Charles's Wain being over 

 the chimneys of their inn at Rochester, set out early 

 in the morning for London ? Was this the spot 

 where Falstaff, brave amid so many confederates, 

 added insult to injury of those travellers by calling 

 them " gorbellied knaves " and " caterpillars," and 



