river to the other. The Bridge was a sort of town to itself; it had its

inn, its beer-houses, its bakeries, its haberdasheries, its food markets,

its manufacturing industries, and even 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

The Prince and The Pauper