could only be
roused by many questions to express himself, having, as it seemed, no
knowledge of the habit.

"I don't blame the taxis, I don't blame nobody. It's come on us, that's
what it has. I left the wife this morning with nothing in the house.
She was saying to me only yesterday: 'What have you brought home the last
four months?' 'Put it at six shillings a week,' I said. 'No,' she said,
'seven.' Well, that's right--she enters it all down in her book."

"You are really going short of food?"

The cabman smiled; and that smile between those two deep hollows was
surely as strange as ever shone on a human face.

"You may say that," he said. "Well, what does it amount to? Before I
picked you up, I had one eighteen-penny fare to-day; and yesterday I took
five shillings. And I've got seven bob a day to pay for the cab, and
that's low, too. There's many and many a proprietor that's broke and
gone--every bit as bad as us. They let us down as easy as ever they can;
you can't get blood from a stone, can you?" Once again he smiled. "I'm
sorry for them, too, and I'm sorry for the horses, though they come out
best of the three of us, I do believe."

One of us muttered something about the Public.

The cabman turned his face and stared down through the darkness.

"The Public?" he said, and his voice had in it a faint surprise. "Well,
they all want the taxis. It's natural. They get about faster in them,
and time's money. I was seven hours before I picked you up. And then you
was lookin' for a taxi. Them as take us because they can't get better,
they're not in a good temper, as a rule. And there's a few old ladies
that's frightened of the motors, but old ladies aren't never very free
with their money--can't afford to be, the most of them, I expect."

"Everybody's sorry for you; one would have thought that----"

He interrupted quietly: "Sorrow don't buy bread . . . . I never had
nobody ask me about things before." And, slowly moving his long face
from side to side, he added: "Besides, what could people do? They can't
be expected to support you; and if they started askin' you questions
they'd feel it very awkward. They know that, I suspect. Of course,
there's such a lot of us; the hansoms are pretty nigh as bad off as we
are. Well, we're gettin' fewer every day, that's one thing."

Not knowing whether or no to manifest sympathy with this extinction, we
approached the horse. It was a horse that "stoo