The Adelphi arches form a little subterranean city; there is nothing like it in London: in some places you catch a glimpse of the river; a small loop-hole then lets in the light like the end of a railway-tunnel, yet seeming to diminish more than these tunnels, on account of the steep descent, until one of the steamers, in passing, appears to fill up the opening like a half-closed door. Beside these arches, there are narrow passages which go dipping down to the water-side, where on either hand houses stand looking at one another in the openings between the darkness. There is a dismal and solitary look about these tall imprisoned houses; you cannot conceive how they are entered, for there appears to be no way to them, and you conclude that they are empty. Or, if they are inhabited, you wonder if the people ever look out of these dim, dirt-ditched windows at the dead-looking walls opposite. We have turned back, and hunted up and down looking from below, but nowhere could we obtain a view of the entrance to those murderous-looking houses. We once saw a butterfly which had lost its way, and got into the little light which had stolen out to look at the entrance of these arches: it went up and down, and hither and thither, seeming to become feebler every moment, as if it had given up all hope of ever swinging with folded wings, like a peabloom, on the flowers again, and we doubted not but that it found a grave amid the green decay of some rotten water-butt. There was a time when the great thoroughfare between Westminster and Temple Bar was all but impassable, when a petition was presented for the repairing of the highway, in which the petitioners complained that the foot-road was so overgrown with thickets and bushes that the wayfarer had difficulty to get along. Besides the brambly and thorny footpath, there were three old bridges to cross between Temple Bar and the village of Charing, which spanned the sweet streams that came tinkling all the way from Highgate-hill, passing along and edging the velvet green of many a pleasant meadow, like braids of silver, before they sent their sailing foam-bells into the bosom of the Thames. Ivy Bridge-lane and Strand Bridge-lane still mark the sites of two of these old bridges. The third was only discovered a few years ago; and, as it was but eleven feet long, every ancient stone might have been preserved and built up again over the Lee or some narrow water-course, so that we might have had another relic of bygone days to have looked upon, a bridge over which conqueror and captive had passed--tears and triumphs--from the Tower to Westminster, and from thence to the Tower again. Bolingbroke weeping--the hero of Agincourt--what a chapter could we have written on that old bridge, which was discovered while making a sewer near the church of St. Clement the Dane! It had been buried so long that not an antiquary mentions it--nowhere is it recorded by our old historians.