mob, they struck down through back lanes and alleys toward the
river. Their way was unobstructed until they approached London
Bridge; then they ploughed into the multitude again, Hendon
keeping a fast grip upon the Prince’s–no, the King’s–wrist. The
tremendous news was already abroad, and the boy learned it from a
thousand voices at once–“The King is dead!” The tidings struck a
chill to the heart of the poor little waif, and sent a shudder
through his frame. He realised the greatness of his loss, and was
filled with a bitter grief; for the grim tyrant who had been such
a terror to others had always been gentle with him. The tears
sprang to his eyes and blurred all objects. For an instant he
felt himself the most forlorn, outcast, and forsaken of God’s
creatures–then another cry shook the night with its far-reaching
thunders: “Long live King Edward the Sixth!” and this made his
eyes kindle, and thrilled him with pride to his fingers’ ends.
“Ah,” he thought, “how grand and strange it seems–I AM KING!”
Our friends threaded their way slowly through the throngs upon the
bridge. This structure, which had stood for six hundred years,
and had been a noisy and populous thoroughfare all that time, was
a curious affair, for a closely packed rank of stores and shops,
with family quarters overhead, stretched along both sides of it,
from one bank of the river to the other. The Bridge was a sort of
town to itself; it had its inn, its beer-houses, its bakeries, its
haberdasheries, its food markets, its manufacturing industries,
and even its church. It looked upon the two neighbours which it
linked together–London and Southwark–as being well enough as
suburbs, but not otherwise particularly important. It was a close
corporation, so to speak; it was a narrow town, of a single street
a fifth of a mile long, its population was but a village
population and everybody in it knew all his fellow-townsmen
intimately, and had known their fathers and mothers before them–
and all their little family affairs into the bargain. It had its
aristocracy, of course–its fine old families of butchers, and
bakers, and what-not, who had occupied the same old premises for
five or six hundred years, and knew the great history of the
Bridge from beginning to end, and all its strange legends; and who
always talked bridgy talk, and thought bridgy thoughts, and lied
in a long, level, direct, substantial bridgy way. It was just the
sort of population to be narrow and ignorant and self-conceited.
Children were born on the Bridge, were reared there, grew to old
age, and finally died without ever having set a foot upon any part
of the world but London Bridge alone. Such people would naturally
imagine that the mighty and interminable procession which moved
through its street night and day, with its confused roar of shouts
and cries, its neighings and bellowing and bleatings and its
muffled thunder-tramp, was the one great thing in this world, and
themselves somehow the proprietors of it. And so they were, in
effect–at least they could exhibit it from their windows, and
did–for a consideration–whenever a returning king or hero gave
it a fleeting splendour, for there was no place like it for
affording a long, straight, uninterrupted view of marching
columns.
Men born and reared upon the Bridge found life unendurably dull
and inane elsewhere. History tells of one of these who left the
Bridge at the age of seventy-one and retired to the country. But
he could only fret and toss in his bed; he could not go to sleep,
the deep stillness was so painful, so awful, so oppressive. When
he was worn out with it, at last, he fled back to his old home, a
lean and haggard spectre, and fell peacefully to rest and pleasant
dreams under the lulling music of the lashing waters and the boom
and crash and thunder of London Bridge.
In the times of which we are writing, the Bridge furnished ‘object
lessons’ in English history for its children–namely, the livid
and decaying heads of renowned men impaled upon iron spikes atop
of its gateways. But we digress.