The horses always go most willingly, and the drivers delight in urging them at top speed. Regardless of consequences, they dash down a hill in a way which would make an English coachy’s hair stand on end, and like a cannon ball through a crowd, without halting or swerving from their course, expecting the crowd to scatter right and left to make way for them. This is all done to the noise of a horrid ear–splitting cracking of the whip. The driver cracks his whip, and considers that having done so, he is discharged of responsibility, and that it is the pedestrian’s own fault if he be run over; just as a golfer considers that when he has cried ‘faar’ before striking his ball, it is the fault of the person struck that he has not got promptly enough out of the way. This cracking of the whip goes on incessantly while the man is with his horse, and even when without, and seems indulged in most frequently from a boyish love of making the odious noise. There is great variety in these cracks. The crack of the heavy carter’s whip differs from that of the coachman’s lighter one. There is the single crack, the double or back and fore crack, and the multiple crack, this last being like the dancing noise produced by those alarming crackers placed by mischievous urchins on a Queen’s Birthday night under the garments of terrified young women. There is the encouraging crack, supposed to cheer the horse on his way; the crack direct, when the driver applies the lash; the practising crack, when he practises for perfection in this ravishing art; the thoughtless crack, when done in vacancy from mere force of habit; the warning crack, when he wishes pedestrians to yield the smooth part of the road, that he may avoid the rough, or simply that he, the dominant power, may maintain majestically his straight undeviating course; the angry crack, when the supposed humble pedestrian, being an Englishman, disregards the warning crack, thinking that he has as good a right or a better to pursue his way, there being room enough to pass by making a slight deviation from the straight; the annunciating crack, particularly affected by town omnibuses to intimate their approach; and the crack jubilant, employed by the hotel omnibuses when, having bagged a man, the driver thus expends all his bottled–up rapture and announces the joyful event on nearing the door of his hotel. The crack may indicate a cracked driver or a crack one, according as it is the passers–by or the driver himself who forms the opinion, and it is an obviously enviable accomplishment which many can manage with their left hand. The poor horses are expected to disregard all cracks but the crack direct, and to appearance do so; but I can’t help thinking that the horrid din is to the animal very much what the buzz of the mosquito is to man, not a _malum in se_, but a sound which proclaims the existence of a torment which at any moment may descend upon its hide. The singular