An eccentric person, well known to ’busmen in one part of London, is a gentleman who stands, almost every night, at certain corners where omnibuses stop and gives a searching look at each one as it comes up. When he started that practice, ten or fifteen years ago, the ’busmen thought that he was some omnibus official, but they soon discovered that he was not. Who or what he has been looking for all these years neither ’busmen, policemen, nor any one else, know. Sometimes conductors say to him, “Coming our way, sir?” Whereupon he answers sharply, “Take your departure.” Usually he allows about a hundred omnibuses to pass before he enters one, but sometimes he lets the last go by and then walks home. Omnibus conductors are, on the whole, a very respectable and intelligent class of men, and this is scarcely to be wondered at, for their pay, after one year’s service, is six shillings a day. These wages cause hundreds of clerks and shopmen to resign their positions and become conductors. Many men who have been in business for themselves, but failed to earn a good living, are to be seen wearing the conductor’s badge and punch. The army, it is pleasing to be able to say, is very well represented--largely by ex-noncommissioned officers. They do not wear their medals on their waistcoats, because they know that to be the practice of old soldiers in straitened circumstances, and also, alas! of rascally impostors who have never worn the Queen’s uniform. If the conductors had uniforms, as the tram-men have, they would wear their medals. The dissipated down-at-heel gentleman, of the type which sometimes drives a cab, never becomes an omnibus conductor, for the very good reason that no company or proprietor would employ him. But the unfortunate gentleman often does. An Oxford graduate was the conductor of a West-End omnibus for some considerable time, and a man who was once the secretary of a flourishing literary society, and a church organist, is and has been one for some years. And a City man, ruined in business, became, by the irony of fate, the conductor of the very omnibus on which he, formerly, rode up to town every morning. A small proportion of conductors do possibly make occasional mistakes in their grammar, but that is no reason why a certain writer should have attributed to them, week after week for some years, a dialect which they do not speak. Evidently the writer has not troubled to study conductors, and imagines that they are drawn from the costermonger class. Conductors, it may be added, do not even say “lidy,” or “lydy,” although it has become the fashion in novels and articles to make out that they do. They say “lady” as distinctly as ever the word was uttered.