To say that there were in those days no omnibuses and no cabs, and of course no railways, either under ground or over it, is a simple matter, and very easily stated. But it is not easy to picture to oneself the whole meaning and consequences of their non-existence. Let any Londoner, with the exception of the comparatively small number of those who use carriages of their own, think what his life would be, and the transaction of his day’s work or of his day’s pleasure, without any means of locomotion save his own legs or a hackney coach, which, at a cost of about five times the cab hire of the present day, used to shut him up in an atmosphere like that of a very dirty stable, and jolt him over the uneven pavement at a pace of about four miles an hour. Dickens has given in his own graphic way more than one sketch of the old hackney coach. I do not think that I ever saw a hackney coach that had been built for the work it was engaged in as such. They were heavy, old-fashioned, rickety vehicles, which had become too heavy, too old-fashioned, too rickety to be retained in the service of the families to which they had once belonged. They were built for the most part with hammer cloths, and many of them exhibited huge and gorgeously-painted armorial bearings on the panels. (By the by, why did not the officials of the Inland Revenue come down on the proprietors of these venerable vehicles for the use of armorial bearings? I take it that the march of modern intelligence, _acuens mortalia corda_, would impel their successors of the present day to do so.) The drivers of those carriages were “in a concatenation accordingly”--shabby, slow, stupid, dirty, and often muddled with drink. We hear occasionally nowadays of a cabman “driving furiously” when drunk. The wording of the charge smacks of another era. Not all the gin in London could have stimulated the old “Jarvey” to drive his skeletons of horses furiously. He was not often incapacitated by drink, but very frequently muddled. If it was necessary for him to descend from his hammer-cloth for the purpose of opening the door of his carriage, which the presence of the “waterman” of the stand for the most part rendered unnecessary, he was a long time about it, and a longer in clambering back to his seat, loaded as he generally was in all weathers with an immense greatcoat of many capes, weatherbeaten out of all resemblance to its original colour. The “watermen,” so-called, as we know from high authority, “because they opens the coach doors,” were nevertheless surrounded by their half-a-dozen or so of little shallow pails of water, as they stood by the side of the curbstone near a coach stand. They were to the hackney-coachman what the bricklayer’s labourer is to the bricklayer. And a more sorry sight can hardly be conceived than the “stand” with its broken-down carriages, more broken-down drivers, and most of all broken-down horses, which supplied us in the