"The driver of a Hackney-coach, having the misfortune to break a leg and an arm by a fall from his box, was rendered incapable of following that business any longer; and therefore posted himself at the corner of one of the principal avenues leading to Covent-garden, with his limbs bound up in the most advantageous manner to move the passengers to commiseration. He told his deplorable case to all, but all passed without pity; and the man must have inevitably perished, had it not come into his head to shift the scene and his situation. The transition was easy; he whipped on a leather apron, and from a Coachman became a poor Joiner, with a wife and four children, that had broke his limbs by a fall from the top of a house. Showers of pence poured daily into his hat, and in a few years he became able to purchase many figures as well as horses; and he is now master of one of the most considerable Livery-stables in London. "The next are the Watermen; and indeed the insolence of these, though they are under some limitations too, is yet such at this time, that it stands in greater need than any other of severe Laws, and those Laws being put in speedy execution. A few months ago, one of these very people being steersman of a passage boat between Queenhithe and Windsor, drowned fifteen people at one time; and when many of them begged of him to put them on shore, or take down his sails, he impudently mocked them, asked some of the poor frighted women if they were afraid of going to the Devil, and bid them say their prayers; then used a vulgar water-phrase, which such fellows have in their mouths, '_Blow, Devil, the more wind the better boat_.' A man of a very considerable substance perishing with the rest of the unfortunate passengers, this villain, who had saved himself by swimming, had the surprising impudence to go the next morning to his widow, who lived at Kingston-upon-Thames. The poor woman, surrounded by a number of sorrowful friends, was astonished to think what could be the occasion of the fellow's coming to her; but thinking he was come to give some account of her husband's body being found, at last she condescended to see him. After a scurvy scrape or two, the monster very modestly 'hoped his good mistress would give him half a-crown to drink her health, by way of satisfaction for a pair of oars and a sail he had lost the night before, when her husband was drowned.'