molecular attraction to take place. In a big factory the entanglement of a man in the machinery creates no great stir.

Standing in Cheapside one day, the poet Heine was reminded of the passage of the French across the Beresina. It seemed to him

as though all London were such Beresina Bridge, where everyone presses on in mad haste to save his scrap of life, where the daring rider stamps down the poor pedestrian, where everyone who falls is lost for ever, where the best friends rush without feeling over each other's corpses, and where thousands, weak and bleeding, grasp in vain at the planks of the bridge and slide down into the ice-pit of death.

Had he lived to witness the motor omnibus which once battered down the parapet of the bridge in its mad haste, he could not have used stronger language. But though we have not all the poetical temperament, we must admit that the bridge has its tragedies. But it called up to the poet's imagination a vision of a different kind. It was that of the fair Mlle. Laurence, whom he had seen with a travelling troupe dancing in the streets to the sound of a drum and a triangle. The challenge of her eye and the grace of her carriage in the dance were sufficient to induce the lonely stranger to invest the history of this child of the dead with the brightest halo of romance, and we are presented with a portrait full of subtle and elusive charm. We are transported to the warmed and cushioned Paris boudoir, and there her own gift of expression in the dance is still led by a strange reminiscent impulse towards the mystery of her birth. It takes the fire of a poetical mind to produce jewels from a material so commonplace, and it was on Waterloo Bridge that the first spark was struck.

But its main characteristic is that you see the same faces at the same time every day in passing. They are as constant as the pigeons which congregate in and about the flour-mills of Seth Taylor, preferring to pick up clean grain to scavenging. At about ten of the morning may always be seen a man busily occupied in one of the embrasures. He wears the dignified aspect of an ambassador, and moves with the deliberation of one who undertakes problems of difficulty. Like a chess-player, he sits with an air of profound thought before a small tray whereon he arranges articles for sale. Out of small paper packages he abstracts matchboxes, umbrella-rings, studs, and such trifles, and fixes his battalions of pencils and bootlaces in strategical array. Here are no phantom brigades, for his army is always at full strength before he goes into action. He is a general in disguise, and there is no doubt he is an ex-soldier from his upright and bold carriage as he vends his wares at a later hour. Another face used invariably to greet you in passing from the bridge to the Strand. It was that of a wizened little blind man who sat in an unused porch of VOL. XCV-No. 568

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Somerset House selling matches, with his knees protected from the weather by a waterproof apron. He announced his presence, and his willingness to satisfy the needs of the smoker, in the shrillest tones, in a kind of gay challenge and a cock-crow ending on a high note. What it was none could say, save that it ended in the word 'gentlemen,' but it arrested attention, which was the main point. This cheerful cry and his upturned, scarred face, smiling at his infirmity like laughter through tears, won him many a copper even from those who did not require matches, and he drove a prosperous trade. One day, however, something appeared to be wanting in the furniture of the street, for his porch was empty. Inquiry elicited that he was dangerously ill in hospital, and after that he never appeared again. When death silences a cheerful note, the world should mourn, for merry hearts are rare, and there are many to whom that street has now become more commonplace, though they don't quite know why.

It is true, the bridge can hardly claim such a large share in the life of the people as those mediæval structures which supported houses and shops, such as old London Bridge. There you might surprise your enemy in an upper chamber, fling him from the window, and go on your way rejoicing, for it was as much part of the City as Eastcheap or the Fleet. But Waterloo Bridge is the daily road of countless human beings, very much like each other in the aggregate and conspicuously commonplace. Enormous masses of incoherent individuals appeal to the imagination and affect some minds with sadness.

I am always haunted [says Lord Rosebery] by the awfulness of London, by the great appalling effect of these millions, cast down, it would appear, by hazard on the banks of this noble stream, working each in their own groove and their own cell, without regard or knowledge of each other.

After all, life itself, when you come to think of it, is very incoherent in its ingredients; its grains, too, like the shifting sand, are very like one another, and its incidents very same. The real interest lies in its exceptions, or at least the types which carry character, and he who crosses Waterloo, or any other, bridge in search of them will not have to travel far or wait very long.

GILBERT COLERIDGE.

The Editor of THE NINETEENTH CENTURY cannot undertake to return unaccepted MSS.