g the
passengers. An omnibus has always appeared to me, to be a perambulatory
exhibition-room of the eccentricities of human nature. I know not any
other sphere in which persons of all classes and all temperaments are so
oddly collected together, and so immediately contrasted and confronted
with each other. To watch merely the different methods of getting into
the vehicle, and taking their seats, adopted by different people, is to
study no incomplete commentary on the infinitesimal varieties of human
character--as various even as the varieties of the human face.

Thus, in addition to the idle impulse, there was the idea of amusement
in my thoughts, as I stopped the public vehicle, and added one to the
number of the conductor's passengers.

There were five persons in the omnibus when I entered it. Two
middle-aged ladies, dressed with amazing splendour in silks and satins,
wearing straw-coloured kid gloves, and carrying highly-scented pocket
handkerchiefs, sat apart at the end of the vehicle; trying to look as if
they occupied it under protest, and preserving the most stately
gravity and silence. They evidently felt that their magnificent outward
adornments were exhibited in a very unworthy locality, and among a very
uncongenial company.

One side, close to the door, was occupied by a lean, withered old man,
very shabbily dressed in black, who sat eternally mumbling something
between his toothless jaws. Occasionally, to the evident disgust of
the genteel ladies, he wiped his bald head and wrinkled forehead with a
ragged blue cotton handkerchief, which he kept in the crown of his hat.

Opposite to this ancient sat a dignified gentleman and a sickly
vacant-looking little girl. Every event of that day is so indelibly
marked on my memory, that I remember, not only this man's pompous look
and manner, but even the words he addressed to the poor squalid little
creature by his side. When I entered the omnibus, he was telling her
in a loud voice how she ought to dispose of her frock and her feet when
people got into the vehicle, and when they got out. He then impressed on
her the necessity in future life, when she grew up, of always having
the price of her fare ready before it was wanted, to prevent unnecessary
delay. Having delivered himself of this good advice, he began to hum,
keeping time by drumming with his thick Malacca cane. He was still
proceeding with this amusement--producing some of the most acutely
unmusical sound