itself in an irrepressible love for all created objects. Mr.
Barker felt it so. After a lengthened interview with the highest legal
authorities, he quitted his ungrateful country, with the consent, and at
the expense, of its Government; proceeded to a distant shore; and there
employed himself, like another Cincinnatus, in clearing and cultivating
the soil--a peaceful pursuit, in which a term of seven years glided
almost imperceptibly away.

Whether, at the expiration of the period we have just mentioned, the
British Government required Mr. Barker's presence here, or did not
require his residence abroad, we have no distinct means of ascertaining.
We should be inclined, however, to favour the latter position, inasmuch
as we do not find that he was advanced to any other public post on his
return, than the post at the corner of the Haymarket, where he officiated
as assistant-waterman to the hackney-coach stand. Seated, in this
capacity, on a couple of tubs near the curbstone, with a brass plate and
number suspended round his neck by a massive chain, and his ankles
curiously enveloped in haybands, he is supposed to have made those
observations on human nature which exercised so material an influence
over all his proceedings in later life.

Mr. Barker had not officiated for many months in this capacity, when the
appearance of the first omnibus caused the public mind to go in a new
direction, and prevented a great many hackney-coaches from going in any
direction at all. The genius of Mr. Barker at once perceived the whole
extent of the injury that would be eventually inflicted on cab and coach
stands, and, by consequence, on watermen also, by the progress of the
system of which the first omnibus was a part. He saw, too, the necessity
of adopting some more profitable profession; and his active mind at once
perceived how much might be done in the way of enticing the youthful and
unwary, and shoving the old and helpless, into the wrong buss, and
carrying them off, until, reduced to despair, they ransomed themselves by
the payment of sixpence a-head, or, to adopt his own figurative
expression in all its native beauty, 'till they was rig'larly done over,
and forked out the stumpy.'

An opportunity for realising his fondest anticipations, soon presented
itself. Rumours were rife on the hackney-coach stands, that a buss was
building, to run from Lisson-grove to the Bank, down Oxford-street and
Holborn; and the rapid increase