The murky beams of an August sun were falling slantingly on the muddy waters beneath my feet as I leaned over the stone balustrades of Westminster Bridge, which connects the ancient borough of Westminster with the Surrey side of the River Thames. Far down the river, I could see craft of every description lying in the stone docks, the pride and boast of all Englishmen. Bridge after bridge loomed up in the sun's hazy beams. Waterloo, Charing Cross, Blackfriars, Vauxhall, and Lambeth Bridges, crowded with traffic and swarming with the wild, heedless, ever-bustling life of the greatest city of the modern world. Under the piers of this grand bridge, nearly a thousand feet long, swept coal barges, wherries bearing noisy cockney watermen, who halloed to each other from roast-beef stomachs and brown-stout lungs, and every minute the paddling, roaring steamboats, peculiar to the Thames,--each boat about sixty feet long, their clean black hulls set off to advantage by the narrow streaks of red paint that served as an ornament to their keels, dashed to and fro, in and out of the bridge, conveying homeward clerks, shop boys, barristers, solicitors, M. P.'s, business men from the city, physicians, and here and there a stray white neck-clothed curate of the Established Church, disgusted with the latest work of Parliament, while, within a few feet of him, scarcely conscious of the visible triumph that shone over his face, sat a Dissenting preacher reading Bright's last effort in the Commons on behalf of Disestablishment. [Illustration: HOUSES OF PARLIAMENT.] On either side of the Thames, beginning at one end and ceasing at the other end of the Houses of Parliament, the magnificent embankment of hewn granite stone stretches, thirty or forty feet in width, for a mile each way, thousands of foot passengers traversing its massive blocks, each man and woman busy with his or her thoughts, or preoccupied with the passing vagaries of the hour. [Sidenote: VIEW FROM WESTMINSTER BRIDGE.] On my right is Westminster Palace and the Houses of Parliament, the finest modern gothic buildings in the world. The dozen towers and belfries of this truly glorious edifice, gilded over with brass, glisten with the refulgent hues of the dying sunset,--for nine hundred and forty feet on the river, these massive, brown buildings, (that, on the first view, bring up memories of some grand, old Gothic Cathedral,) stretch away with tower, buttress, and pinnacle, presenting a river facade which cannot be equaled by any other edifice for legislative purposes in the world.