Again a pleasant sketch: “Taking them as a body, the cabmen are as industrious and deserving a class as you can find in the community. There still lingers amongst them, perhaps, some of the old spirit which prompted the cabmen to expostulate rather forcibly with Mr. Pickwick. And considering the vast area in which these public servants have to work, and the elasticity of the four-mile radius in the minds of some citizens, the friction is surprisingly small. Not a few of us have known cabmen whom we held in special regard. There was one affable driver that I invited to the Lyceum, giving him the money for admission. The next time I saw him I said, ‘Well, and how did you like the play?’ He hesitated for a moment, choosing, as I thought, the most grateful words to express his pleasure and admiration, and then he said, ‘Well, sir, I didn’t go.’ ‘You didn’t go! Why not?’ ‘Well, sir, you see, there’s the missus, and she preferred the Waxworks.’ “A friend of mine, a great ornament of the medical profession, used to tell a story of the cabman who drove him regularly on his rounds for some years, and always spoke of him with affectionate familiarity by his Christian name. The time came for the rising surgeon to set up a brougham, and with much reluctance he broke this news to his good friend the cabby, who responded with cheerful alacrity, ‘Oh, you’re going to get rid of me, are you? Not a bit of it—I’ll drive that brougham.’ And drive it he did, till he became too old and infirm for the duty. ‘Ah, well, I must give it up,’ he said one day; ‘I ain’t fit for it any longer.’ ‘Dear me,’ said the doctor, in great concern, ‘I am very sorry, very sorry indeed. And what are you going to do?’ ‘What am I going to do? What are _you_ going to do for me? Don’t you fear—I’ll never leave you!’ And he spent the rest of his days on a pension. That story has always seemed to me to put the spirit of charity and goodwill in a thoroughly practical light. You can scarcely get through life in this town without a sense of your dependence on cabby’s skill and endurance, and with as grateful an obligation to him as that of the voyager to the pilot amidst the reefs in a storm. In this labyrinth of London, it is rare for cabby not to know his way. I have never ceased to wonder at the cabman’s dexterity of eye and hand—unrivalled, I venture to say, in any other capital in Europe. And when you consider how small is the proportion of accidents in this vast business of locomotion, you may cheerfully grant that cabby has some claim upon your respect and generosity.” I think the whole “key” of this is admirably appropriate, and the touch of the lightest.[61]