nal structure remained; it was once covered with
houses; Peter the Dutchman's famous water-wheels plashed at its side;
from the dark street and projecting gables noted tavern-signs vibrated
in the wind. The exclusive thoroughfare from the city to Kent and
Surrey, what ceremonial and scenes has it not witnessed,--royal
entrances and greetings, rites under the low brown arches of the old
chapel, revelry in the convenient hostels, traffic in the crowded mart,
chimes from the quaint belfry, the tragic triumph of vindictive law in
the gory heads upon spikes! The veritable and minute history of London
Bridge would illustrate the civic and social annals of England; and
romance could scarce invent a more effective background for the varied
scenes and personages such a chronicle would exhibit than the dim local
perspective, when, ere any bridge stood there, the ferryman's daughter
founded with the tolls a House of Sisters, subsequently transformed into
a college of priests. By a law of Nature, thus do the elements of
civilization cluster around the place of transit; thus do the courses of
the water indicate the direction and nucleus of emigration,--from the
vast lakes and mighty rivers of America, whereby an immense continent is
made available to human intercourse, and therefore to material unity, to
the point where the Thames was earliest crossed and spanned. More
special historical and social facts may be found attached to every old
bridge. In war, especially, heroic achievement and desperate valor have
often consecrated these narrow defiles and exclusive means of advance
and retreat:--

"When the goodman mends his armor
And trims his helmet's plume,
When the good-wife's shuttle merrily
Goes flashing through the loom,
With weeping and with laughter
Still is the story told
How well Horatius kept the bridge
In the good old days of old."

The bridge of Darius spanned the Bosphorus,--of Xerxes, the
Hellespont,--of Caesar, the Rhine,--and of Trajan, the Danube; while the
victorious march of Napoleon has left few traces so unexceptionably
memorable as the massive causeways of the Simplon. Cicero arrested the
bearer of letters to Catiline on the Pons Milonis, built in the time of
Sylla on the ancient Via Flaminia; and by virtue of the blazing cross
which he saw in the sky from the Ponte Molle the Christian emperor
Constantine conquered Maxentius. The Pont du Gard near Nismes and the
St. Es