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Adelaide Kemble sing, and Charles Dickens handed me to my carriage, taking leave of me with a God bless you!' and I drove home through the soft summer air with my head among the stars."

Charles Dickens's last earthly home was called Gad's Hill. "The London News" tells how he obtained the place:

"Though not born at Rochester, Mr. Dickens spent some portion of his boyhood there, and was wont to tell. how his father, the late Mr. John Dickens, in the course of a country ramble, pointed out to him as a child the house at Gad's-hill Place, saying, 'There, my boy, if you work, and mind your book, you will perhaps one day live in a house like that.' This speech sunk deep; and in after-years, and in the course of his many long pedestrian rambles through the lanes and roads of the pleasant Kentish country, Mr. Dickens came to regard this Gad's-hill house lovingly, and to wish himself its possessor. This seemed an impossibility. The property was so held, that there was no likelihood of its ever coming into the market; and so Gad's Hill came to be alluded to jocularly as representing a fancy which was pleasant enough in dreamland, but would never be realized. Meanwhile, the years rolled on, and Gad's Hill became almost forgotten; then a further lapse of time, and Mr. Dickens felt a strong wish to settle in the

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country, and determined to let Tavistock House. About this time, and by the strangest coincidence, his intimate friend and close ally, Mr. W. H. Wills, chanced to sit next to a lady at a London dinner-party, who remarked, in the course of conversation, that a house and grounds had come into her possession, of which she wanted to dispose. The reader will guess the rest. The house was in Kent, was not far from Rochester, had this and that distinguishing feature which made it like Gad's Hill, and like no other place; and the upshot of Mr. Wills's dinnertable chit-chat with a lady whom he had never met before was, that Charles Dickens realized the dream of his youth, and became the possessor of Gad's Hill. It will now be sold, as well as the valuable collection of original pictures which Mr. Dickens gathered together during his life, and many of which are illustrative of his works."

Gad's Hill is near Rochester, on the London side, and about twenty-five miles from London. Donald G. Mitchell, in "Hearth and Home," has given a very pleasant picture of Gad's Hill, and Dickens at home. "Dinner was a gala-time; but unceremonious, and regardless of dress, as he might be in the earlier hours of the day, he, in his latter years at least, kept by the old English ceremonial dress for dinner. His butler and servant were also habited conventionally; and the same notion of conventional requirement, it will be remembered, he

observed always in his readings and appearance on public occasions. But the laws of etiquette, however faithfully and constantly followed, did not sit easily on him; and there is no portrait of him, which, to our mind, is so agreeable as that which represents him in an old loose morning-jacket, leaning against a column of his porch upon Gad's Hill, with his family grouped around him. As dinner came to its close, the little grandchildren tottled in, his 'wenerable' friends, as he delighted to call them; and with their advent came always a rollicking time of cheer.”

"The

Mr. Philp has thus pictured Gad's Hill. house is a charming old mansion a little modernized,— the lawn exquisitely beautiful, and illuminated by thousands of scarlet geraniums. The estate is covered with magnificent old trees; and several cedars of Lebanon I have never seen equalled. In the midst of a small plantation across the road, opposite the house, approached by a tunnel from the lawn under the turnpike-road, is a French châlet, sent to Dickens as a present, in ninety-eight packing-cases. Here Mr. Dickens

can be perfectly

does most of his writing, where he quiet, and not disturbed by anybody. I need scarcely say that the house is crowded with fine pictures, original sketches for his books, choice engravings, &c.; in fact, one might be amused for a month in looking over the objects of interest, which are numerous and beautiful.

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