f as fast as
he can, leaving us to do the same, and to wish, as we walk away, that we
could impart to others any portion of the amusement we have gained for
ourselves.

CHAPTER XVII--THE LAST CAB-DRIVER, AND THE FIRST OMNIBUS CAD

Of all the cabriolet-drivers whom we have ever had the honour and
gratification of knowing by sight--and our acquaintance in this way has
been most extensive--there is one who made an impression on our mind
which can never be effaced, and who awakened in our bosom a feeling of
admiration and respect, which we entertain a fatal presentiment will
never be called forth again by any human being. He was a man of most
simple and prepossessing appearance. He was a brown-whiskered,
white-hatted, no-coated cabman; his nose was generally red, and his
bright blue eye not unfrequently stood out in bold relief against a black
border of artificial workmanship; his boots were of the Wellington form,
pulled up to meet his corduroy knee-smalls, or at least to approach as
near them as their dimensions would admit of; and his neck was usually
garnished with a bright yellow handkerchief. In summer he carried in his
mouth a flower; in winter, a straw--slight, but, to a contemplative mind,
certain indications of a love of nature, and a taste for botany.

His cabriolet was gorgeously painted--a bright red; and wherever we went,
City or West End, Paddington or Holloway, North, East, West, or South,
there was the red cab, bumping up against the posts at the street
corners, and turning in and out, among hackney-coaches, and drays, and
carts, and waggons, and omnibuses, and contriving by some strange means
or other, to get out of places which no other vehicle but the red cab
could ever by any possibility have contrived to get into at all. Our
fondness for that red cab was unbounded. How we should have liked to
have seen it in the circle at Astley's! Our life upon it, that it should
have performed such evolutions as would have put the whole company to
shame--Indian chiefs, knights, Swiss peasants, and all.

Some people object to the exertion of getting into cabs, and others
object to the difficulty of getting out of them; we think both these are
objections which take their rise in perverse and ill-conditioned minds.
The getting into a cab is a very pretty and graceful process, which, when
well performed, is essentially melodramatic. First, there is the
expressive pantomime of every one of the eighteen cab