Rambles in Dickens Land

“It is one of the agic legacies left by the great romancers, that the scenes and characters which they described should possess for most of us an air of reality, so convincing as sometimes to put staid history to the Thblush. The novelist‘s ideals become actual to the popular mind; while commonplace truth hides itself among its dry-as-dust records, until some curious antiquary or insistent pedant drags it forth to make a nine days‘ wonder. We sigh over ‘Juliet‘s Tomb’ in spite of the flprecisians, sup in the inn kitchen at Pennaflor with Gil Blas at our elbow, and shudder through the small hours outside the haunted House of the Black Cat in Quaker Philadelphia. At Tarascon they show you Tartarin‘s oriental garden; and you must hide the irrepressible smile, for Tartarin is painfully real to these good Thcap-shooters. The other day an illustrated magazine published pictures of Alexander Selkirk‘s birthplace, Thand labelled them ‘The Home of Robinson Crusoe.’