The Mysteries of Modern London

by George R. Sims

The bridesmaids have arrived and are waiting in the porch. Presently a carriage drives up, and there is a buzz of admiration as the beautiful and aristocratic bride alights, and, leaning on the arm of her father, enters the church.

There is a bishop at the altar, and he is "assisted" by a distant relative of the bridegroom. The service is fully choral, and the lady journalists are taking notes of the dresses for tomorrow's newspapers.

As the bridal party comes out of the church there is a little accident. A man falls in a fit in the crowd, and the policeman, turning to help him, the people surge up, and the bridal procession is interrupted. In the confusion some of the flowers in the bride's bouquet become detached and fall to the ground. A workman with a sad, careworn face bends down and picks them up. He will take them home when his work is over. The flowers of the bride's bouquet will lie on the breast of the dead girl who has given him a year of happy wedded life, and now lies dead in the desolate little home.

The fair young bride of the West will know nothing of the dead wife in the East. But the flowers that were bought for the bridal of the one will lie in the coffin of the other.

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Of all the dramatic contrasts of our modern London life few are so striking as those which are conventional at a trial for murder at the Old Bailey.

In the shadow of death on the last day of the trial sits the prisoner, while a large portion of the spectators take the proceedings as an interesting and sometimes thrilling form of entertainment.

There are rooms set apart in the Old Bailey for the necessary refreshment of officials connected with the court, and in one of these, while the jury are deliberating on their verdict, and the prisoner is waiting in the cells below in feverish agony, lady visitors take tea and cakes, and male visitors have coffee and cigarettes.

In the corridors of the court there are little groups chatting together, and the talk is not always of the trial.

On the emotional man surveying the scene and listening to the light conversation, sometimes to the jokes, this feature of a murder trial makes a vivid impression. He looks around him at the light-hearted groups and thinks of the dumb despair of the man or woman who waits, white-faced and terror-stricken, in a cell below the dock.