The new bridge which was standing in all its spick and span newness when you came last year, is a ruin now, washed away by the spring freshets.

A glance tells you that the massive-looking piers were hollow, built of one thickness of stone, shell-fashion, and filled with plain earth.
Somebody must have cheated.

Nothing new in that.

They are all thieves nowadays, seeking to eat, as you say in your dialect, with a strict simplicity which leaves nothing to the imagination.

At all events this bridge was a fraud, and the peasants clamber down a steep footpath they have made through its ruins, and up the other side.
And now you are in the town.