to question this row as a certain consequence
of three or four million people living together and scuffling for coin,
with more agility, perhaps, but otherwise in the usual way. However,
after this easy silence of London, which in numbers is a mightier city,
I began to feel that there was a seduction in this idea of necessity.
Our noise in New York was not a consequence of our rapidity at all. It
was a consequence of our bad pavements.

Any brigade of artillery in Europe that would love to assemble its
batteries, and then go on a gallop over the land, thundering and
thundering, would give up the idea of thunder at once if it could hear
Tim Mulligan drive a beer waggon along one of the side streets of
cobbled New York.

CHAPTER III.

Finally, a great thing came to pass. The cab horse, proceeding at a
sharp trot, found himself suddenly at the top of an incline, where
through the rain the pavement shone like an expanse of ice. It looked to
me as if there was going to be a tumble. In an accident of such a kind a
hansom becomes really a cannon in which a man finds that he has paid
shillings for the privilege of serving as a projectile. I was making a
rapid calculation of the arc that I would describe in my flight, when
the horse met his crisis with a masterly device that I could not have
imagined. He tranquilly braced his four feet like a bundle of stakes,
and then, with a gentle gaiety of demeanour, he slid swiftly and
gracefully to the bottom of the hill as if he had been a toboggan. When
the incline ended he caught his gait again with great dexterity, and
went pattering off through another tunnel.

I at once looked upon myself as being singularly blessed by this sight.
This horse had evidently originated this system of skating as a
diversion, or, more probably, as a precaution against the slippery
pavement; and he was, of course, the inventor and sole proprietor--two
terms that are not always in conjunction. It surely was not to be
supposed that there could be two skaters like him in the world. He
deserved to be known and publicly praised for this accomplishment. It
was worthy of many records and exhibitions. But when the cab arrived at
a place where some dipping streets met, and the flaming front of a
music-hall temporarily widened my cylinder, behold there were many cabs,
and as the moment of necessity came the horses were all skaters. They
were gliding in all directions. It might have been a rink. A great