Personally, I like miracles; and this miracle is all the more patent, I think, now that the bridge has been in commission for almost six hundred years and still is entirely serviceable. Yet while its piers and arches, its essential parts, remain nearly as the Brothers built them, the bridge has undergone such modifications in the course of the past century--in order to fit it to the needs of modern traffic--that its picturesqueness has been destroyed. The chapel of St. Nicholas upon one of its piers, and the tower at its centre, were razed about the end of the last century; a little later the fortified approaches were removed; in the year 1854, to provide for the increasing river navigation, the first two arches from the right bank were replaced by a single iron arch of two hundred feet span over the main channel; and in the year 1860 the entire superstructure on the north side, with a part of the superstructure on the south side, was torn down--and in place of the old narrow roadway, with turn-outs on each pier, there was built a roadway uniformly twenty-two feet wide. In a sentimental way, of course, these radical changes are to be regretted; but I am sure that the good Brothers, could they have been consulted in the premises, would have been the first to sanction them. For they were not sentimentalists, the Brothers; they were practical to the last degree. What they wanted was that their bridge, living up to their own concept of duty, should do the greatest amount of good to the greatest number of men.