Page:Omnibuses and Cabs.djvu/169

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been validated.
Conductors and Coachmen
149

have attributed to them, week after week some years, a dialect which they do not speak. Evidently the writer has not troubled to study conductors, and imagines that they are drawn from the costermonger class. Conductors, it may be added, do not even say "lidy," or "lydy," although it has become the fashion in novels and articles to make out that they do. They say "lady" as distinctly as ever the word was uttered.

Omnibus drivers are, as a body, intellectually inferior to conductors. They an usually brought up among horses, and, unlike the conductors, are totally unfitted for any other calling than the one by which they earn their living. Their wages, which are eight shillings a day, after one year's service, enable them to live in comfort and to put a shilling on a horse in every race of any importance. They have no ambition but to "back a winner," and many men who started driving at the age of twenty-one are not a penny richer after forty years' regular work. They continue driving until they become too old, and then they realise that they have been exceedingly foolish. One driver, who for more forty years earned over two guineas a week, now sweeps a crossing