there can be no mistake about it. I will tell
you how he expressed himself the other
evening, when we were drinking tea with
dear old Mr. Dunny and his family, at
Number Thirteen, in the Square.

"Something will have to be done," said my
brother, plunging into the subject, in his
usual sledge-hammer way. "Something will
have to be done, and that speedily, to render
it possible to cross over some of our more
crowded thoroughfares, without the danger
and delay which at present make it a misery
in many cases to have to get from one side of
the street to the other. Take, as an example,
the instance of the crossings at the Regent
Circus, Oxford Street. Over and over again,
and all through the day, when London is at
all full, you may see a crowd of persons
standing on the kerbstone, many of them
with the keenest apprehension and terror
expressed in their faces, waiting for an
opportunity to cross, like souls on the borders of
the Styx. And well they may wait. Between
them and the opposite shore is a tangled
mass of carriages, omnibuses, cabs, tradesmen's
carts, railway vans, and other engines
of mutilation and destruction, to thread
among the mazes of which is an undertaking
which requires a degree of physical courage
of quckness of eye, of firmness of nerve, and
activity of limb, such as may not be expected
from everybody, and certainly not from the
aged and infirm, from timid ladies and
frightened children.  You may at any moment,
now that London is getting so full, see
this little crowd waiting for a chance to get
across.  Sometimes an adventurous spirit—a
young man generally of a hardy constitution
—will make a start.  Rash youth!  Length
of days has not yet tamed him into patience,
and he is off   Soon, however, to return, and
join the anxious throng from whom he so
daringly separated himself. His attempt
was a failure, and he turns and flies before
a briskly-trotting hearse.  Sometimes, one
member of this little company of crossers
seems to have the confidence of the rest. He
is probably a man past his first youth, and
therefore deemed fit to be trusted. He is a
large-faced man, with importance in his look
—'a portly man i' faith, and a corpulent.'
So when he makes a start, the rest accompany
him. He feels their confidence, and
assumes a protecting air, very pleasant to
behold. Alas, he has involved them in the
worst of all scrapes. He has led them into
the middle of the road, and there they stick.
They wheel rapidly about. They oscillate
backwards and forwards. The portly man
becomes a disciple of the 'sauve qui peut'
school; he directs his flock, dives in and out
among the backs of carriages, and reaches
land at last, hustled about, muddy, and
crestfallen, a melancholy example of the transitory
nature of human greatness. As for the rest,
they are dispersed in all directions. Some
take advantage of an opportunity of return
to the shores from which they lately
embarked.  Some follow an omnibus a little
way up the street, and the another a little
way down, and so get over in a zig-zag
manner; and the rest, remaining where they
are, panic-stricken and motionless, are at
length joined by others, till they make a body
so formidable that no horse that ever was
foaled would venture to attack them; and so
at last, they get over, in a mighty and
compact force."

"Is this a true picture?" asks my brother
Columbus, suddenly pulling himself up, and
arresting his lenghtened address.

His audience is speechless, and he goes on.

"Will anybody tell me that this is
irremediable—that there is no way out of this
difficulty.  There is a way, is my answer.  A
bridge is the way."

To tell how we all started, and how Mr.
Dunny looked at Mrs. Dunny, and she at a
knife which Columbus had near him, as if she
thought that dangerous weapons ought to be
kept out of the way of a person so far gone in
madness as this.

"A bridge is the way," continued my brother
fearlessly.  "People build bridges over a
raging torrent of water when they want to
get across it, why not over a raging torrent of
omnibuses, cabs, carriages, and railway-vans,
when you want to get across that?
Why not—confining ourselves to this same
Regent Circus—why not throw up four light
iron bridges, of ornamental design, at each of
the crossings?  Where is the obstacle to this?
Not in the traffic, certainly—it would go on
all the better underneath.  The bridge would
be made high enough in the centre to allow
the most loaded van in London to pass
under it, and at the sides there would be
two flights of steps, one for ascending, and
the other for descending.  There is no
obstacle in the traffic; and, if you come
to appearances, I maintain that these four
bridges would be a positive improvement,
and that they might be so constructed
as to have an effect that would be even
beautiful."

Before we had at all got over this staggering
notion of building a bridge over a
dangerous place that you want to get across, my
brother was off along another tack.  The
defects connected with our street crossings
having led him, I suppose, by some fantastic
transition of ideas to the defects of the
streets themselves, he begins to ask what
improvements we can hope for in a town
whose authorities remain contented with the
system of Macadamisation as at present
administered?  Huge lumps of granite, flung
in loose heaps upon a road, and left there in
a vague hope that in course of time the
narrow wheels of passing vehicles may break
it up and finally render it fine and smooth
enough for traffic.  So that the carriages
have to make their own road fit for use by a
long and painful process, infinitely destructive