I am afraid my friend Teddy thought that I was joking. He certainly seemed to have difficulty in finding a reply to this. Then an explanation struck him.
“You mean what we call a coach,” he suggested. “Thing with four horses and a toot-toot-toot business—post-horn, we call it. What?”
“I mean an omnibus,” I replied. “The elegant, the fascinating, British 'bus. And here I have found a man who can drive me. This is my new servant, Halfred Winkles.”
Lumme stared at him, as well he might, for my Halfred cut a very different figure from the grave, polished, quietly attired Mingle. To produce the very best impression possible, he had dressed himself in a suit of conspicuously checkered cloth, very tight in the leg and wide at the foot, and surmounted by a very bright-blue scarf tightly knotted round his neck. In his button-hole was an artificial tulip, in his pocket a wonderful red-and-yellow handkerchief. His ruddy face shone so brightly that I shrewdly suspected his friend Wid-dup had scrubbed it with a handful of straw, and he held in his hand, pressed against his breast, the same shining waterproof hat beneath which he drove the 'bus.
“Left your last place long?” asked Lumme, of this apparition.
“Gave 'em notice this arternoon, sir,” said Halfred.
“Who were you with?”
