It is a curious thing, and a fact not generally known, I believe, that all decayed taxicab drivers in London, those who are unfortunate, have fallen from a high estate.  Each and every one of them used to drive the London to Oxford coach in the days of ’orses.

I met a number of these personages, fat, with remarkably red faces and large honeycombed noses.  Not at all like the alert, athletic lads, a type of mechanical engineer, who have arisen as cabbies with the advent of taxis.  What do they know about ’orses?

It was such an old boy who drove me from the neighbourhood of Russell Square, where I was stopping, to Chelsea, where I went into lodgings.  He frequently had the pleasure of driving Americans, he remarked.  “Thank you, sir,” he said.

I required to have my shoes repaired, and I inquired of my landlord where might be found a good cobbler.  He told me that there was an excellent one in Battersea.  “In Battersea!” I said.  “Is there none in Chelsea?  How am I to get my shoes clear over to Battersea?”

“Why,” he replied, “we will send the cobbler a card and he’ll send some one over for the boots and——­”

“And then, I suppose,” I said, “he will send us another card saying that the boots are done and so on.  And in the meantime I could have had the boots repaired and worn out again.”

Naturally I was for wrapping up the shoes in a piece of newspaper and setting out straight off to find a cobbler.  But my landlord would not hear of such a thing at all.  “Of course you are an American,” he said.

I gathered that while such a proceeding might be all right in my country it wouldn’t do in England.  He did not want lodgers, I understood, going in and out of his house with parcels under their arms.  It would reflect on him.  He was a man with a lively mind, and he told me a little story.

“How do you like the new lodger?” asked the first housemaid of the second.

“Oh, he’s very nice indeed,” replied the second housemaid.  “But he’s not a gentleman.  He helped me carry the coals upstairs yesterday.”

“Could you spare me a trifle, sir?” asked the errand man in my street.  “I haven’t had tea today.”

It’s a funny thing, that; isn’t it?—­our just being all “Americans” (when we are not referred to as “Yankees” or “Yanks").  We are never United Statesians.  It is the “American Ambassador,” and the “American Consul-General.”  I have even heard Dr. Wilson referred to as the “President of America.”

One day I saw a tourist.  He was an American, a young man I knew in New York.  I found him going into the Houses of Parliament.  I was fond of going in there frequently, and said I would accompany him.

With an easy stride, at a speed I should say of about two miles an hour, he walked straight through the Houses of Parliament; through the Norman porch, through the King’s robing room, the Royal or Victoria gallery, the Prince’s chamber, the sumptuously decorated House of Peers, the Peers’ lobby, the spacious central hall, the Commons’ corridor and the House of Commons; glancing about him the while at art and architecture, lavish magnificence and the eternal garments and symbols of history.  Returning to the central hall, we passed through St. Stephen’s and Westminster Hall and arrived again in the street.