with the many mirrors which delighted the master.

Opening out of these rooms is a conservatory, paid for out of "the
golden shower from America" and completed but a few days before Dickens'
death, holding yet the ferns he tended. The dining-room was the scene of
much of that emphatic hospitality which it pleased the novelist to
dispense, his exuberant spirits making him the leader in all the jollity
and conviviality of the board. Here he compounded for bibulous guests
his famous "cider-cup of Gad's Hill," and at the same table he was
stricken with death; on a couch beneath yonder window, the one nearest
the hall, he died on the anniversary of the railway accident which so
frightfully imperiled his life. From this window we look out upon a lawn
decked with shrubbery and see across undulating cornfields his beloved
Cobham. From the parqueted hall, stairs lead to the modest
chambers--that of Dickens being above the drawing-room. He lined the
stairway with prints of Hogarth's works, and declared he never came down
the stairs without pausing to wonder at the sagacity and skill which had
produced these masterful pictures of human life.

The house is invested with roses, and parterres of the red geraniums
which the master loved are ranged upon every side. It was some fresh
manifestation of his passion for these flowers that elicited from his
daughter the averment, "Papa, I think when you are an angel your wings
will be made of looking-glasses and your crown of scarlet geraniums."
Beneath a rose-tree not far from the window where Dickens died, a bed
blooming with blue lobelia holds the tiny grave of "Dick" and the tender
memorial of the novelist to that "Best of Birds." The row of gleaming
limes which shadow the porch was planted by Dickens's own hands. The
pedestal of the sundial upon the lawn is a massive balustrade of the old
stone bridge at nearby Rochester, which little David Copperfield crossed