," he replied. "You have no idea," he continued, a dreamy
expression stealing over his furrowed face, "how unutterably tired one
can become of the walk from Piccadilly Circus to the Vine Street Police
Court. Yet, what else was there for us to do? Simply nothing. Sometimes
we would put out a street lamp, and a man would come round and light it
again. If one insulted a policeman, he simply took no notice. He did
not even know he was being insulted; or, if he did, he seemed not to
care. You could fight a Covent Garden porter, if you fancied yourself at
that sort of thing. Generally speaking, the porter got the best of it;
and when he did it cost you five shillings, and when he did not the price
was half a sovereign. I could never see much excitement in that
particular sport. I tried driving a hansom cab once. That has always
been regarded as the acme of modern Tom and Jerryism. I stole it late
one night from outside a public-house in Dean Street, and the first thing
that happened to me was that I was hailed in Golden Square by an old lady
surrounded by three children, two of them crying and the third one half
asleep. Before I could get away she had shot the brats into the cab,
taken my number, paid me, so she said, a shilling over the legal fare,
and directed me to an address a little beyond what she called North
Kensington. As a matter of fact, the place turned out to be the other
side of Willesden. The horse was tired, and the journey took us well
over two hours. It was the slowest lark I ever remember being concerned
in. I tried one or twice to persuade the children to let me take them
back to the old lady: but every time I opened the trap-door to speak to
them the youngest one, a boy, started screaming; and when I offered other
drivers to transfer the job to them, most of them replied in the words of
a song popular about that period: 'Oh, George, don't you think you're
going just a bit too far?' One man offered to take home to my wife any
last message I might be thinking of, while another promised to organise a
party to come and dig me out in the spring. When I mounted the dickey I
had imagined myself driving a peppery old colonel to some lonesome and
cabless region, half a dozen miles from where he wanted to go, and there
leaving him upon the kerbstone to swear. About that there might have
been good sport or there might not, according to circumstances and the
colonel. The idea of a trip to an outlyin