"Sort o' papers, sir!" answered the landlord, "why very capital papers: three of 'em at least,—them as is heddited by Mr. Mudford, a werry clever man, sir."
"Mudford!—what—Mudford that used to edit the Courier?"
"The werry same gen'lman, sir," answered the cockney landlord.
Mr. Mortimer turned pale. "And the other paper?" he said, by way of question.
"Oh! that, sir, is a low radical affair—"The Kent Herald;"—but I don't belong to that party, though they're werry strong here; and the paper sells well, they say."
Mr. Mortimer sat down, and tried to think. He sipped a pint of sherry, and munched a couple of biscuits, and he did think; for the result was, that he took coach in another hour, and set off for Chatham and Rochester.
And now, Mr. Mortimer, singularly enough, rose from zero to fever heat, in his hopes and resolves about the fulcrum and the intellectual lever. "The four towns," as the Chatham people told him,—Strood, Rochester, Chatham, and Brompton, united as they were, lying around the basin of the Medway, filled with trading enterprise, blending so many great interests,—the dockyard, the soldiers' barracks, the hulks, the Dissenters, so all-powerful in Chatham, the Jew brokers, the cigar smugglers (or makers rather), the corporation of Rochester and its two members, and Chatham and its one member of Parliament, the cathedral, and the castle in ruins,—were all thrown upon Mr. Mortimer in such clustered phrases of inviting importance, that he completely lost his "rules of prudence," and proclaimed in a tone very like a shout, and very like Archimedes, only he didn't speak Greek,—"I have found it!" Yes: Mr. Mortimer declared he had found it; found the fulcrum for the lever, and the new newspaper should be published at Chatham: the forty thousand inhabitants of the four towns, he said, were surely able to support a paper themselves. He was decided, he declared he was.
Mr. Mortimer's resolution was confirmed beyond the possibility of change, he felt assured, by a little voyage in the steamer to Sheerness. Chatham was "just the place," the Sheerness people assured him, for the publication of a paper, and they would support it; in fact, it would have the support of "the whole Isle of Sheppy!" Mr. Mortimer was exhilarated,—nay, he was exultant; and, although he had determined only to stay an hour in Sheerness, and then get on board a steamer for returning up the Thames, he was so pleased that he remained all day, and drank as hard, in his earnestness, as he had at the "Ranelagh Gardens" in the Isle of Thanet.
Mr. Mortimer had but one call now to make, in order to complete the line of Kentish survey,—circle, rather, which he had so sagaciously laid down for himself; and he, accordingly, got out at Gravesend, the next morning, as he was proceeding in the packet on the Thames. Not that Mr. Mortimer thought Gravesend of great importance, but it might be as well, he said within himself, to call there. Unfortunate Mr. Mortimer! what did he know of the "relative importance" of the towns of Kent? Landlords, company, shopkeepers, loungers of all grades, in fact, every body, insisted that Gravesend was the only place in Kent where a paper could possibly prosper! People little thought of the real worth of Gravesend. "But you have no member of parliament," said poor Mr. Mortimer, feeling all his old tribulation returning. What then? it was answered: they had a corporation, and two piers, and two packet companies, with eternal war between the piers and the companies,—war that shook the whole bank of the Thames, and was even perceived to have caused sundry vibrations in London bridge itself, where "the companies'" packets landed their passengers. Besides, they had had a paper in Gravesend once,—"The Journal,"—and it prospered; but no sooner was it removed to Greenwich than it became worthless. That ought to be a convincing proof to Mr. Mortimer that Gravesend was the proper, the only fulcrum for his intellectual lever. Above all,—Gravesend was now become "London in parvo,"—a fine, well-fed and well-dressed gentleman observed: genteel people,—he meant prosperous merchants,—removed their families thither for the entire summer season, and just took the run with the steamers to London and back, morning and evening, to transact business: the metropolis possessed its finest suburb in the rising and extending and rapidly-improving town of Gravesend!—and the company cheered the gentleman's speech most enthusiastically,—and, poor Mr. Mortimer! he was, more than ever, confounded, puzzled, bothered, perplexed, flummaxed, and flabbergasted! He could not return to London that day: that was as clear as the sun at noon,—although the "fulcrum" question was become so disastrously dim, since he left Chatham and Sheerness. Nay, Mr. Mortimer staid at Gravesend even the whole of the following day; and the more people he saw—(and he saw no end of new faces,—in fact, they appeared to him, in his puzzled condition, to spring out of the earth—though the fact was they came in fresh shoals by the packet every morning, noon, and night, from town,)—the more people he saw, the more he was told that Gravesend was the place wherein he ought to publish "The Intellectual Lever:" that there he could lift all Kent, and get himself returned,—the conclusion, he thought, ought to be,—for any Kentish borough he chose to represent!
"Well," said Mr. Mortimer to himself, as he was dressing on the fourth morning of his stay in Gravesend: "it is strange—certainly."