The Prince and the Pauper - Penn State University

Mark Twain
another cry shook the night with its far-reaching thunlow-townsmen intimately, and had known their fathers
ders: “Long live King Edward the Sixth!” and this made and mothers before them—and all their little family
his eyes kindle, and thrilled him with pride to his fin- affairs into the bargain. It had its aristocracy, of course—
gers’ ends. “Ah,” he thought, “how grand and strange it its fine old families of butchers, and bakers, and what-
seems—I am King!”
not, who had occupied the same old premises for five or
Our friends threaded their way slowly through the six hundred years, and knew the great history of the
throngs upon the bridge. This structure, which had stood Bridge from beginning to end, and all its strange leg-
for six hundred years, and had been a noisy and popuends; and who always talked bridgy talk, and thought
lous thoroughfare all that time, was a curious affair, for bridgy thoughts, and lied in a long, level, direct, sub-
a closely packed rank of stores and shops, with family stantial bridgy way. It was just the sort of population
quarters overhead, stretched along both sides of it, from to be narrow and ignorant and self-conceited. Children
one bank of the river to the other. The Bridge was a sort were born on the Bridge, were reared there, grew to old
of town to itself; it had its inn, its beer-houses, its age, and finally died without ever having set a foot
bakeries, its haberdasheries, its food markets, its manu- upon any part of the world but London Bridge alone.
facturing industries, and even its church. It looked upon Such people would naturally imagine that the mighty
the two neighbours which it linked together—London and interminable procession which moved through its
and Southwark—as being well enough as suburbs, but street night and day, with its confused roar of shouts
not otherwise particularly important. It was a close cor- and cries, its neighings and bellowing and bleatings and
poration, so to speak; it was a narrow town, of a single its muffled thunder-tramp, was the one great thing in
street a fifth of a mile long, its population was but a this world, and themselves somehow the proprietors of
village population and everybody in it knew all his fel- it. And so they were, in effect—at least they could ex-
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