worn into hollows by the same
mixed mechanism. The masonry of the top was clamped with iron at each
joint; since it had been no uncommon thing for desperate men to wrench
the coping off and throw it down the river, in reckless defiance of the
magistrates.

For to this pair of bridges gravitated all the failures of the town;
those who had failed in business, in love, in sobriety, in crime. Why
the unhappy hereabout usually chose the bridges for their meditations in
preference to a railing, a gate, or a stile, was not so clear.

There was a marked difference of quality between the personages who
haunted the near bridge of brick and the personages who haunted the far
one of stone. Those of lowest character preferred the former, adjoining
the town; they did not mind the glare of the public eye. They had been
of comparatively no account during their successes; and though they
might feel dispirited, they had no particular sense of shame in their
ruin. Their hands were mostly kept in their pockets; they wore a leather
strap round their hips or knees, and boots that required a great deal
of lacing, but seemed never to get any. Instead of sighing at their
adversities they spat, and instead of saying the iron had entered into
their souls they said they were down on their luck. Jopp in his time of
distress had often stood here; so had Mother Cuxsom, Christopher Coney,
and poor Abel Whittle.

The miserables who would pause on the remoter bridge were of a politer
stamp. They included bankrupts, hypochondriacs, persons who were what is
called "out of a situation" from fault or lucklessness, the inefficient
of the professional class--shabby-genteel men, who did not know how to
get rid of the weary time between breakfast and dinner, and the yet more
weary time between dinner and dark. The eye of this species were mostly
directed over the parapet upon the running water below. A man seen there
looking thus fixedly into the river was pretty sure to be one whom
the world did not treat kindly for some reason or other. While one in
straits on the townward bridge did not mind who saw him so, and kept
his back to the parapet to survey the passers-by, one in straits on this
never faced the road, never turned his head at coming footsteps, but,
sensitive to his own condition, watched the current whenever a stranger
approached, as if some strange fish interested him, though every finned
thing had been poached out of the river years before.

T