“I never seen the equal of these people,” one of their drivers had said, emitting a roar like a bull of Bashan, which barely saved an elderly woman from what looked like deliberate suicide under his horse’s hoofs. “Yerra, ma’am, is it owning the road you are?”—to the lady, who pursued her leisurely way with the calmness born of many such episodes. “Young or old, ’tis all the same; they do be strolling the streets for all the world as if they was picking mushrooms, and taking no notice of you till you’d be knocking them down—and then they do be annoyed! There’s only one way, and that is to let a roar out of you at them—and then the look they give you is worse than a curse!” “I suppose you get into trouble if you kill more than six a day,” Wally had said. The jarvey grinned. “Trouble, is it? Sure, some of them makes a trade of it; there’s them old wasters in this town that’d ask nothing better than that you’d knock ’em down—not to kill them, but to knock a small piece off them, the way you’d have to support them afterwards. There’s one man I but tipped with the end of a shaft, and he strolling at his aise in a crowd. Crawling at a slow walk I was; and what did he do but rowl on the ground before me, letting on that he was kilt. There was none of the polis about, so I left him rowling and calling murder!” “Did you hear any more of him?” “I did. Didn’t he come to me that evening and say he had his witnesses ready, and he’d be making a polis-court matter of it if I didn’t give him five pounds? ‘I do be making twenty-eight shillings a week,’ says he, ‘in me health,’ says he, and now ’tis the way I cannot lift me hand to me head,’ he says. Him, that never earned five shillings in a week in his life, and not that, if he could steal it! I towld him to bring his polis-court and his dirty witnesses, and that if he did, I’d pay the five pounds for the pleasure I’d have in belting the life out of him.” “And did he bring it?” “He did not. I seen him a week after that, and he cleaning steps. ‘I’m glad to see you looking so well and hearty, me poor man!’ says I to him; and he thrun a look at me fit to kill. Sure I knew that one’d be more anxious to keep out of the way of the polis than to be dandhering about them with his cases!”