nd as rich) as I take them to be, I presume that this
experience is not uncommon. I suppose that they are all being thrown out
of cabs, all over London. Still, as there are some people, virginal and
remote from the world, who have not yet had this luxurious experience, I
will give a short account of the psychology of myself when my hansom cab
ran into the side of a motor omnibus, and I hope hurt it.

I do not need to dwell on the essential romance of the hansom cab--that
one really noble modern thing which our age, when it is judged, will
gravely put beside the Parthenon. It is really modern in that it is
both secret and swift. My particular hansom cab was modern in these two
respects; it was also very modern in the fact that it came to grief.
But it is also English; it is not to be found abroad; it belongs to a
beautiful, romantic country where nearly everybody is pretending to be
richer than they are, and acting as if they were. It is comfortable, and
yet it is reckless; and that combination is the very soul of England.
But although I had always realised all these good qualities in a hansom
cab, I had not experienced all the possibilities, or, as the moderns put
it, all the aspects of that vehicle. My enunciation of the merits of a
hansom cab had been always made when it was the right way up. Let me,
therefore, explain how I felt when I fell out of a hansom cab for the
first and, I am happy to believe, the last time. Polycrates threw one
ring into the sea to propitiate the Fates. I have thrown one hansom
cab into the sea (if you will excuse a rather violent metaphor) and the
Fates are, I am quite sure, propitiated. Though I am told they do not
like to be told so.

I was driving yesterday afternoon in a hansom cab down one of the
sloping streets into the Strand, reading one of my own admirable
articles with continual pleasure, and still more continual surprise,
when the horse fell forward, scrambled a moment on the scraping stones,
staggered to his feet again, and went forward. The horses in my cabs
often do this, and I have learnt to enjoy my own articles at any angle
of the vehicle. So I did not see anything at all odd about the way
the horse went on again. But I saw it suddenly in the faces of all the
people on the pavement. They were all turned towards me, and they were
all struck with fear suddenly, as with a white flame out of the sky. And
one man half ran out into the road with a movement of the elbow as if
war