BRIDGE.

They that are above
Have ends in everything.

A lame man was standing on the bridge that crosses the Neuer Pregel from
the Kant Strasse--which is the centre of the city of Konigsberg--to the
island known as the Kneiphof. This bridge is called the Kramer Brucke,
and may be described as the heart of the town. From it on either hand
diverge the narrow streets that run along the river bank, busy with
commerce, crowded with the narrow sleighs that carry wood from the
Pregel up into the town.

The wider streets--such as the Kant Strasse, running downhill from the
royal castle to the river, and the Kneiphof'sche Langgasse, leading
southward to the Brandenburg gate and the great world--must needs make
use of the Kramer Brucke. Here, it may be said, every man in the town
must sooner or later pass in the execution of his daily business,
whether he go about it on foot or in a sleigh with a pair of horses.
Here the idler and those grave professors from the University, which was
still mourning the death of the aged Kant, nearly always passed in their
thoughtful and conscientious promenades.

Here this lame man, a cobbler by trade, plying his quiet calling in a
house in the Neuer Markt, where the lime-trees grow close to the upper
windows, had patiently kept watch for three days. He was, like many lame
men, of an abnormal width and weight. He had a large, square, dogged
face, which seemed to promise that he would wait there till the crack of
doom rather than abandon a quest.

It was very cold--mid-winter within a few miles of the frozen Baltic
on the very verge of Russia, at that point where old Europe stretches
a long arm out into the unknown. The cobbler was wrapped in a sheepskin
coat, which stood out all round him with the stiffness of wood, so
that he seemed to be living inside a box. To keep himself warm he
occasionally limped across from end to end of the bridge, but never
went farther. At times he leant his arms on the stone wall at the Kant
Strasse end of the bridge, and looked down into the Lower Fish
Market, where women from Pillau and the Baltic shores--mere bundles of
clothes--stood over their baskets of fish frozen hard like sticks. It
was a silent market. One cannot haggle long when a minute's exposure
to the air will give a frost-bite to the end of the nose. The would-be
purchaser can scarcely make an effective bargain through a fringe of
icicles that rattle against his lips if he open th