high road passed through the chapel, and separated the congregation from the reading-desk and from the pulpit! What a relic of old wayfaring life! Yet it was cleared away as hateful to progress. A small oratory remains on the bridge at Bradford-on-Avon, Wiltshire. It is not quite on the same lines as the original structure, for in the seventeenth century its roofing was altered into a sort of dome built with stone. It is a “housing,” a tiny place for a passing prayer, not a chapel; and this class of bridge oratory has become so uncommon that I doubt whether another exists. As Mr. Emanuel Green has said, it “is now perhaps unique,” and “should be carefully preserved.”[96] In recent times neither reverence nor care has been bestowed on this oratory. After the Reformation it was profaned, as a matter of course. For a long time it was used as a “lock-up,” and in 1887 it was a powder magazine! Its pyramidal roof is crowned with a tall finial, which in its turn carries a pretty wind vane; and in the wind vane we find the emblem of St. Nicholas--a gudgeon. The townsfolk used to be known as Bradford gudgeon, and those of them who had been shut up in the little prison on the bridge were said to have been “under the fish and over the water.”[97] At St. Ives, Huntingdonshire, called Slepe in “Domesday Book,” and Asleep to-day, there is another degraded oratory, a bigger one, with an apsidal termination eastward. Its original parapet has been torn down, and a brick house of two storeys adds greatly to its height. Derby also has a bridge chapel, whose history may be studied in the works of the Rev. Dr. Cox; but I am more interested in the oratory on Rotherham Bridge, Yorkshire. Here, as at Wakefield, the chapel stands on a small island, the upper part is corbelled out on each side, and the end against the bridge is carried by a half-arch. The plan is a rectangle about 30 ft. by 14 ft., while at Wakefield the external width is 20 ft. and the total length about 45 ft. During many years Rotherham Chapel was almost as beautiful as the masterpiece at Wakefield; and even now, after infinite ill-usage, there is charm in the embattled parapet graced with pinnacles. [Illustration: GOTHIC BRIDGE AT BARNARD CASTLE, YORKSHIRE]