The horse-drawn omnibus is older than most people think. Soon it will have reached the eightieth anniversary of its advent. The first real London omnibus was run from the “Yorkshire Stingo” (near the present Great Central Hotel), Paddington, to the Bank in 1829, and was found so convenient that in two years ninety vehicles of the kind were in public service. At first the driver used to collect fares; but as competition increased, the drivers raced on their routes (as they do at the present day), and the conductors—or “cads,” as they were then called—practically fought to secure passengers, especially if the passenger was an unprotected female of the Early Victorian days. The “knife board” of the eighties, and the narrow, horizontal footrests which made the top of the ’bus an impossible altitude for women to attain, has become as extinct as the dodo, since garden seats and staircases to the top have popularised the vehicle for both sexes. If I may be allowed a digression, may I say that, in 1900 and 1904, when I was in up-to-date New York, omnibuses of the oldest possible type, with seats behind the driver almost as difficult to climb as a chimney-stack from the street, were still running from Maddison Square up Fifth Avenue past Central Park. I well remember admiring the Dewey Arch at the top of Broadway, erected after the Admiral’s victories in the Philippines, and then being persuaded to see the charms of Central Park from the top of a ’bus—“if you have the pluck to climb up,” said my friend. Pluck! Fancy anyone using such a word to an Englishwoman. Why, of course I had. We waited. The ’bus came. There, at one of the busiest points of that busy city’s streets, the vehicle drew up. There was no stairway, no ladder even as to a coach. I simply had to clamber from axle to wheel, from wheel to small step below the driver, and—dragged and hauled by that kindly person—land somehow into a seat beside him,—then to step over that into a row of seats placed still higher behind the driver’s back. I had split my sleeve and made a pair of white kid gloves filthy in the process, but I was there! No wonder American women do not aspire to the tops of omnibuses, and no wonder that the bustling crowd stopped to look at a mad Englishwoman in her best frock attempting athletic feats. Even the fat Irish policeman, white bâton in hand, looked on and marvelled. Up-to-date as the Americans boast to be, it was curious to find such an obsolete old vehicle still doing duty in the heart of their metropolis. Many of the roads in important towns in America are to-day little better than those of London a century and a half ago. Another great change in locomotion in London came with the trams, which are more recent than ’buses; but the horse-drawn tram has already disappeared and given place to electricity, while the tubes are accustoming us to take our short journeys underground.