n 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