"Now, take one of our London winter days--which you like--a regular keen frost, or a yaller fog, or a soaking rain, or one of those cold, mizzly, clinging, go-through-your-very-marrow sort of days. Get your breakfast in a hurry, and be off to the yard and get on the box. All's ready for us, for we don't clean horses or 'busses; there's men on purpose to do that. Well, I'm well wrapped up, and I get on my box at eight o'clock in the morning, and begin my City journey. There we are all times; we mustn't go no faster, nor we mustn't go no slower; time's time, and we have to keep it if we can, but sometimes we can't, and do what we will, we're late--with extra passengers, or a block, or something wrong with a horse, or one thing or another; and then, if it happens to be near dinner time, we have to start back as usual, and often and often, I haven't got off the box, but swallowed a mouthful of something where I sat, and been off again. "Drive, drive, and pull up, all the afternoon, with about five or six minutes for my tea, and then up and at it again, hour after hour, till the last journey's done, and then I've got off the box hardly able to stand, I've been so cramped; while scarcely ever before eleven, and generally twelve, I've got home, worn out, to my bit of supper. Fifteen or sixteen hours, Sunday and weekday, is too much of a good thing, ain't it? And on such days as I've been talking about, when you can't feel your feet, and your hands won't hardly hold rein or whip, and the cold goes through and through you, don't you think as one wants something to comfort one a bit? because if you don't, I should like them as grumbles to try it on for a month and see. "Coats, of course, keeps out a deal, but the coat ain't been made that will keep out all the cold and wet. Oilskins and macintoshes always acts on me rheumatically, and gives me pains all over in the jynts; so I puts on as many reg'lar coats and weskits as I can get on one above another, and wraps up my legs. But in all that long time, it's no use, the cold creeps in somewhere like the thin edge of a wedge, and lets in ever so much more, and though we mostly gets a shilling or so a day more than the conductors, I don't know but what I'd rather have their life, on account of the jumping up and down. "I get very tired of it by the time night comes; but a good sleep and the little bit of home comfort one gets seems to put one right before morning, though, I'm blest if I think a sea captain could know much less of his children than we 'bus drivers do of ours. But there, it can't last for ever, and I s'pose some day I shall be lifted off my box as Sam was. Couldn't get down, poor chap, for he stuck to it right to the very last, though his missis wanted him to lay up long before.