34 STREET RAIL OMNIBUS. 



price and one vehicle for all. " Well then," I remark to 

 him, " wonder not at my surprise, when, fully impressed 

 with this levelling idea on coming" into New York, I saw 

 drawn up at the side of a street or square what I deemed 

 to be a lot of little Lord Mayor's coaches, bedizened with 

 plated metal, silver, lace, and other profuse decorations, 

 and learned that these were two-horse ' hack carriages,' 

 on the stand for public hire, and not for the locomotion of 

 civic dignitaries, and above all, that the cost of the hire 

 of these public conveyances put them utterly and completely 

 beyond the reach of any but the better and richer classes! 9 

 Curious this ; but I shall in other places have to touch on 

 the boasted and said-to-be beneficial and national equal 

 ity again. 



I must, in passing, recount one or two of the many in 

 stances of the pleasantries of the omnibus, and the de 

 lights for the well-educated and moral traveller contained 

 within their tobacco-juicy panels. The day was intensely 

 hot, and humanity in the streets, as wasps, unpleasantly 

 busy. - The omnibus had become crammed to suffocation 

 with fellows who perpetually startled you with the idea 

 that they had spat on you a fate which is to an Eng 

 lishman as filthily insulting as it seems to be soothingly 

 pleasing to an American. They did not spit on you, 

 however ; they missed your knee or the flap of your coat 

 to a hair's breadth, and only put patterns on the floor be 

 tween your feet. Had the Americans been half the shots 

 with firearms they proved to be with the juice of tobacco, 

 I should have gone home a defeated * sportsman ; as it 

 was, they spit with infinitely better aim than they shot, 

 though generally they were very good with the rifle, and 

 fair with the shot-gun, but by no means superior to 

 other nations. Well, then, the crowd in this omnibus 



