ere written of, the bridge, specifically known by that
name, was a singular and sombre pile, built by a cowled monk--Peter of
Colechurch--some five hundred years before. Its arches had long been
crowded at the sides with strange old rookeries of disproportioned and
toppling height, converting the bridge at once into the most densely
occupied ward and most jammed thoroughfare of the town, while, as the
skulls of bullocks are hung out for signs to the gateways of shambles,
so the withered heads and smoked quarters of traitors, stuck on pikes,
long crowned the Southwark entrance.

Though these rookeries, with their grisly heraldry, had been pulled down
some twenty years prior to the present visit, still enough of grotesque
and antiquity clung to the structure at large to render it the most
striking of objects, especially to one like our hero, born in a virgin
clime, where the only antiquities are the forever youthful heavens and
the earth.

On his route from Brentford to Paris, Israel had passed through the
capital, but only as a courier; so that now, for the first time, he had
time to linger, and loiter, and lounge--slowly absorb what he
saw--meditate himself into boundless amazement. For forty years he never
recovered from that surprise--never, till dead, had done with his
wondering.

Hung in long, sepulchral arches of stone, the black, besmoked bridge
seemed a huge scarf of crape, festooning the river across. Similar
funeral festoons spanned it to the west, while eastward, towards the
sea, tiers and tiers of jetty colliers lay moored, side by side, fleets
of black swans.

The Thames, which far away, among the green fields of Berks, ran clear
as a brook, here, polluted by continual vicinity to man, curdled on
between rotten wharves, one murky sheet of sewerage. Fretted by the
ill-built piers, awhile it crested and hissed, then shot balefully
through the Erebus arches, desperate as the lost souls of the harlots,
who, every night, took the same plunge. Meantime, here and there, like
awaiting hearses, the coal-scows drifted along, poled broadside,
pell-mell to the current.

And as that tide in the water swept all craft on, so a like tide seemed
hurrying all men, all horses, all vehicles on the land. As ant-hills,
the bridge arches crawled with processions of carts, coaches, drays,
every sort of wheeled, rumbling thing, the noses of the horses behind
touching the backs of the vehicles in advance, all bespattered with e