pair of horses. We read general excitement
prevailed at the towns near, and a great muster gathered on the beach at
the day of landing. It was long before the native mind got reconciled to
the phenomenon. The people, we are told, were terrified if approached by
a horse. They would jump into the river, run up cocoa-nut and other
trees, and climb houses for safety while the animal passed their place.
In England this stage of terror has long been passed, and horses
themselves are gradually giving place to steam.

Nevertheless, for short traffic--for transit to places where the snort of
the steam engine will never be heard--for crooked ways inimical to
machinery--for the convenience of those who like to be taken up and set
down at their own doors--for the comfort of the nervous, whose firm
belief is, that for the regular railway traveller a fatal smash is only a
question of time, the London omnibus is a permanent institution. It is
difficult to perceive how people managed before it had an existence--when
the fare from Highbury to the Bank was a shilling, and when the traveller
for the journey from Highgate to London, along the dreary wastes of
Holloway, paid no less than half-a-crown, and when even for that
exorbitant sum, as it would now be deemed, you had no chance of a trip
unless you had booked your place. In those times happy--yea, thrice
happy--were the fathers of families living beyond the sound of Bow bells.
In these, how can a man help going to the bad, rise he ever so early, or
sit he up ever so late, eat he ever so of the bread of carefulness, if
mamma and daughters can ride from the furthest suburbs--from remote
Peckham or airy Paddington--for the ridiculously small sum of sixpence,
or even less, in a vehicle as luxuriously fitted up as a private
carriage, to the shops so tempting to the female mind of the fashionable
and dissipated West? Happily the evil is tending to cure itself. The
ladies have acquired a mode of dressing which simply renders, in the
majority of cases, the use of an omnibus an impossibility.

The date of the London omnibus is not ancient. Mr. Shillibeer, in his
evidence before the Board of Health, stated that on July 7th, 1829, he
started the first pair of omnibuses in the metropolis, from the Bank to
the Yorkshire Stingo, New-road, copied from Paris, where omnibuses had
been established in 1819, by M. Lafitte, the banker. Each omnibus was
drawn by three horses abreast, had no outs