thin daughter, the
bodkin, or rather packing-needle of the party, sat more forward, and on
a smaller space than bodkins do now-a-days. I was perched up three feet
higher than more modern vehicles, and my two lamps began to look like
little dark lanterns. But my obsoleteness rendered me only more suited
to the service in which I was enlisted. Honest Roger, the red-haired
coachman, would have looked like a clown in a pantomime, in front of a
fashionable equipage; and Simon the footboy, who slouched at my back,
would have been mistaken for an idle urchin surreptitiously enjoying a
ride. But on my unsophisticated dickey and footboard no one could doubt
but that Roger and Simon were in their proper places. The rector died;
of course he had nothing more to do with the _living_, it passed into
other hands; and a clerical income being (alas, that it should be so!)
no inheritance, his relict suddenly plunged in widowhood and poverty,
had the aggravated misery of mourning for a deaf husband, while she was
conscious that the luxuries and almost the necessaries of life were for
ever snatched from herself and her child.

Again I found myself in London, but my beauty was gone, I had lost the
activity of youth, and when slowly I chanced to creak through Long Acre,
Houlditch, my very parent, who was standing at his door sending forth a
new-born Britska, glanced at me scornfully, and knew me not! I passed on
heavily--I thought of former days of triumph, and there was madness in
the thought I became a _crazy_ vehicle! straw was thrust into my inward
parts, I was numbered among the fallen,--yes, I was now a
hackney-chariot, and my number was one hundred!

What tongue can tell the degradations I have endured! The persons who
familiarly have _called_ me, the wretches who have sat in me--never can
this be told. Daily I take my stand in the same vile street, and nightly
am I driven to the minor theatres--to oyster-shops--to desperation!

One day, when empty and unoccupied, I was hailed by two police-officers
who were bearing between them a prisoner. It was the seducer of my
second ill-fated mistress; a first crime had done its usual work, it had
prepared the mind for a second, and a worse: the seducer had done a deed
of deeper guilt, and _I_ bore him one stage towards the gallows. Many
months after, a female called me at midnight: she was decked in tattered
finery, and what with fatigue and recent indulgence in strong liquors,
she was scarc