Sketches by Boz, Illustrative of Every-Day Life and Every-Day PeopleDickens, Charles
General
Sketches by Boz, Illustrative of Every-Day Life and Every-Day People
Dickens, Charles
London (England) -- Social life and customs -- 19th century; London (England) -- Social life and customs -- 19th century -- Fiction
The getting out of a cab is, perhaps, rather more complicated in its
theory, and a shade more difficult in its execution. We have studied
the subject a great deal, and we think the best way is, to throw
yourself out, and trust to chance for alighting on your feet. If you
make the driver alight first, and then throw yourself upon him, you
will find that he breaks your fall materially. In the event of your
contemplating an offer of eightpence, on no account make the tender, or
show the money, until you are safely on the pavement. It is very bad
policy attempting to save the fourpence. You are very much in the power
of a cabman, and he considers it a kind of fee not to do you any wilful
damage. Any instruction, however, in the art of getting out of a cab,
is wholly unnecessary if you are going any distance, because the
probability is, that you will be shot lightly out before you have
completed the third mile.
We are not aware of any instance on record in which a cab-horse has
performed three consecutive miles without going down once. What of
that? It is all excitement. And in these days of derangement of the
nervous system and universal lassitude, people are content to pay
handsomely for excitement; where can it be procured at a cheaper rate?
But to return to the red cab; it was omnipresent. You had but to walk
down Holborn, or Fleet-street, or any of the principal thoroughfares in
which there is a great deal of traffic, and judge for yourself. You had
hardly turned into the street, when you saw a trunk or two, lying on
the ground: an uprooted post, a hat-box, a portmanteau, and a
carpet-bag, strewed about in a very picturesque manner: a horse in a
cab standing by, looking about him with great unconcern; and a crowd,
shouting and screaming with delight, cooling their flushed faces
against the glass windows of a chemist’s shop.—‘What’s the matter here,
can you tell me?’—‘O’ny a cab, sir.’—‘Anybody hurt, do you know?’—‘O’ny
the fare, sir. I see him a turnin’ the corner, and I ses to another
gen’lm’n “that’s a reg’lar little oss that, and he’s a comin’ along
rayther sweet, an’t he?”—“He just is,” ses the other gen’lm’n, ven bump
they cums agin the post, and out flies the fare like bricks.’ Need we
say it was the red cab; or that the gentleman with the straw in his
mouth, who emerged so coolly from the chemist’s shop and
philosophically climbing into the little dickey, started off at full
gallop, was the red cab’s licensed driver?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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