The policeman shoves this along the road jailward and the drunk lies at rest in it, stretched out full length, with a neat rubber bedspread drawn up over his prostrate form to screen him from drafts and save his face from the gaze of the vulgar. Drunkards are treated with the tenderest consideration in London; for, as you know, Britons never will be slaves--though some of them in the presence of a title give such imitations of being slaves as might fool even so experienced a judge as the late Simon Legree; and--as perchance you may also have heard--an Englishman's souse is his castle. So in due state they ride him and his turreted souse to the station house in a perambulator. From midnight to daylight the taxicabs by the countless swarm will be charging about in every direction--charging, moreover, at the rate of eight pence a mile. Think that over, ye taxitaxed wretches of New York, and rend your garments, with lamentations loud! There is this also to be said of the London taxi service--and to an American it is one of the abiding marvels of the place--that, no matter where you go, no matter how late the hour or how outlying and obscure the district, there is always a trim taxicab just round the next corner waiting to come instantly at your whistle, and with it a beggar with a bleak, hopeless face, to open the cab door for you and stand, hat in hand, for the penny you toss him. In the main centers, such as Oxford Circus and Piccadilly Circus and Charing Cross, and along the Embankment, the Strand and Pall Mall, they are as thick as fleas on the Missouri houn' dawg famous in song and story--the taxis, I mean, though the beggars are reasonably thick also--and they hop like fleas, bearing you swiftly and surely and cheaply on your way. The meters are honest, openfaced meters; and the drivers ask no more than their legal fares and are satisfied with tips within reason. Here in America we have the kindred arts of taxidermy and taxicabbery; one of these is the art of skinning animals and the other is the art of skinning people. The ruthless taxirobber of New York would not last half an hour in London; for him the jail doors would yawn. Oldtime Londoners deplored the coming of the taxicab and the motorbus, for their coming meant the entire extinction of the driver of the horse-drawn bus, who was an institution, and the practical extinction of the hansom cabby, who was a type and very frequently a humorist too. But an American finds no fault with the present arrangement; he is amply satisfied with it.