[Original]
[Original]
ON A HANSOM CAB
I saw a surprising spectacle in Regent Street last evening. It was a hansom cab. Not a derelict hansom cab such as you may still occasionally see, with an obsolete horse in the shafts and an obsolete driver on the box, crawling along like a haggard dream, or a forlorn spectre that has escaped from a cemetery and has given up hope of ever finding its way back—no, but a lively, spic-and-span hansom cab, with a horse trotting in the shafts and tossing its head as though it were full of beans and importance, and a slap-up driver on the box, looking as happy as a sandboy as he flicked and flourished his whip, and, still more astonishing, a real passenger, a lady, inside the vehicle.
I felt like taking my hat off to the lady and giving a cheer to the driver, for the apparition was curiously pleasing. It had something of the poignancy of a forgotten odour or taste that summons up whole vistas of the past—sweetbriar or mignonette or the austere flavour of the quince. In that trotting nag and the swaying figure on the box there flashed upon me the old London that used to amble along on four legs, the London before the Deluge, the London before the coming of King Petrol, when the hansom was the jaunty aristocrat of the streets, and the two-horse bus was the chariot of democracy. London was a slow place then, of course, and a journey say, from Dollis Hill to Dülwich, was a formidable adventure, but it was very human and humorous. When you took your seat behind, or still better, beside the rosy-cheeked bus-driver, you settled down to a really good time. The world was in no hurry and the bus-driver was excellent company. He would tell you about the sins of that “orf horse,” the idiosyncrasies of passengers, the artifices of the police, the mysteries of the stable. He would shout some abstruse joke to a passing driver, and with a hard wink include you in the revelry. The conductor would stroll up to him and continue a conversation that had begun early in the morning and seemed to go on intermittently all day—a conversation of that jolly sort in which, as Washington Irving says, the jokes are rather small and the laughter abundant.