However, somewhat to the rear there was a comfortable coffee room, where our luncheon was neatly served.  We had learned by this time that all well regulated hotels in the medium sized towns, and even in some of the larger cities—­as large as Bristol, for instance—­have two dining rooms, one, generally for tourists, called the “coffee room,” with separate small tables, and a much larger room for “commercials,” or traveling salesmen, where all are seated together at a single table.  The service is practically the same, but the ratio of charges is from two to three times higher in the coffee room.  We found many old hotels in retired places where a coffee room had been hastily improvised, an innovation no doubt brought about largely by the motor car trade and the desire to give the motorist more aristocratic rates than those charged the well-posted commercials.  Though we stopped in Dartford no longer than necessary for lunch and a slight repair to the car, it is a place of considerable interest.  Its chief industry is a large paper-mill, a direct successor to the first one established in England near the end of the Sixteenth Century, and Foolscap paper, standard throughout the English-speaking world, takes its name from the crest (a fool’s cap) of the founder of the industry, whose tomb may still be seen in Dartford Church.

A short run over a broad road bordered with beautiful rural scenery brought us into Rochester, whose cathedral spire and castle with its huge Norman tower loomed into view long before we came into the town itself.  A few miles out of the town our attention had been attracted by a place of unusual beauty, a fine old house almost hidden by high hedges and trees on one side of the road and just opposite a tangled bit of wood and shrubbery, with several of the largest cedars we saw in England.  So picturesque was the spot that we stopped for a photograph of the car and party, with the splendid trees for a background, but, as often happens in critical cases, the kodak film only yielded a “fog” when finally developed.

When we reached Rochester, a glance at the map showed us that we had unwittingly passed Gad’s Hill, the home where Charles Dickens spent the last fifteen years of his life and where he died thirty-six years ago.  We speedily retraced the last four or five miles of our journey and found ourselves again at the fine old place with the cedar trees where we had been but a short time before.  We stopped to inquire at a roadside inn which, among the multitude of such places, we had hardly noticed before, and which bore the legend, “The Sir John Falstaff,” a distinction earned by being the identical place where Shakespeare located some of the pranks of his ridiculous hero.  The inn-keeper was well posted on the literary traditions of the locality.  “Yes,” said he, “this is Gad’s Hill Place, where Dickens lived and where he died just thirty-six years ago today, on June 9th, 1870; but the house is shown only on Wednesdays of each week and the proprietor doesn’t fancy being troubled on other days.  But perhaps, since you are Americans and have come a long way, he may admit you on this special anniversary.  Anyway, it will do no harm for you to try.”