A little after daybreak we were on Waterloo bridge again, and even at that hour a small assemblage had gathered around some object at the Southwark end of the bridge, where we could see the tall helmets of two policemen in the midst of the crowd of carters and market gardeners, who were en route to Covent Garden Market, and had stopped to look upon the body of a woman who had been fished up from the river.
Yes, there lay the body of the girl whose toll to eternity had been paid by her own rash act—stretched out on the cold stones, her garments dripping, her fingers clinched, and her eyes stark wide open. A young woman she was, but oh, how worn! The face was pinched, and the long, silken lashes sunk into the eyebrows.
The day was breaking in the East, but the policemen held their lanterns, which they had not yet extinguished, over the poor, pale features, and the grimy garments, revealing the long, matted, and tangled hair, and the stark, cold body, which had once held an Immortal Soul, but was now all that remained of the gay, merry-hearted, lost girl, who had fully reaped the harvest of vice—the Wages of Sin—called by the Evangelist, Death.
Last year, the number of suicides in London amounted to 1,160, and of this number 415 committed self-destruction by drowning. The Thames Watermen fish many a ghastly body from the River, and for each carcass—the result of their terrible trolling, they receive three pounds from the City authorities.
