same reason that I believe in free will, for the same
reason that I believe in fixed character of virtue,
the reason that could only be expressed by saying
that I do not choose to be a lunatic, I continued
to believe that this honest cabman was wrong, and
I repeated to him that I had really taken him at the
corner of Leicester-square. He began with the
same evident and ponderous sincerity, “You hailed
me outside Euston Station, and you said——”
And at this moment there came over his features a
kind of frightful transfiguration of living astonishment,
as if he had been lit up like a lamp from the inside.
“Why, I beg your pardon, sir,” he said.
“I beg your pardon. I beg your pardon.
You took me from Leicester-square. I remember
now. I beg your pardon.” And with
that this astonishing man let out his whip with a
sharp crack at his horse and went trundling away.
The whole of which interview, before the banner of
St. George I swear, is strictly true.
. . . . .
I looked at the strange cabman as he lessened in the
distance and the mists. I do not know whether
I was right in fancying that although his face had
seemed so honest there was something unearthly and
demoniac about him when seen from behind. Perhaps
he had been sent to tempt me from my adherence to those
sanities and certainties which I had defended earlier
in the day. In any case it gave me pleasure to
remember that my sense of reality, though it had rocked
for an instant, had remained erect.
An Accident
Some time ago I wrote in these columns an article
called “The Extraordinary Cabman.”
I am now in a position to contribute my experience
of a still more extraordinary cab. The extraordinary
thing about the cab was that it did not like me; it
threw me out violently in the middle of the Strand.
If my friends who read the daily news are
as romantic (and as rich) as I take them to be, I
presume that this experience is not uncommon.
I suppose that they are all being thrown out of cabs,
all over London. Still, as there are some people,
virginal and remote from the world, who have not yet
had this luxurious experience, I will give a short
account of the psychology of myself when my hansom
cab ran into the side of a motor omnibus, and I hope
hurt it.
I do not need to dwell on the essential romance of
the hansom cab— that one really noble modern
thing which our age, when it is judged, will gravely
put beside the Parthenon. It is really modern
in that it is both secret and swift. My particular
hansom cab was modern in these two respects; it was
also very modern in the fact that it came to grief.
But it is also English; it is not to be found abroad;
it belongs to a beautiful, romantic country where
nearly everybody is pretending to be richer than they
are, and acting as if they were. It is comfortable,
and yet it is reckless; and that combination is the
