difficulty of climbing into a cab, prevented old men and women from patronising the new vehicle. They remained satisfied with hackney-coaches, but young and middle-aged men—"dandies" and shopmen striving to imitate them—gloried in cabs, and many of them boasted of the number of times they had been thrown out of them.
Dickens on several-occasions mentioned the cabs of this period. Describing, in "Sketches by Boz," morning in the streets of London, he wrote—
"Cabs, with trunks and band-boxes between the drivers' legs and outside the apron, rattle briskly up and down the streets on their way to the coach-offices or steam-packet wharfs; and the cab-drivers and hackney coachmen who are on the stand polish up the ornamental part of their dingy vehicles—the former wondering how people can 'them wild beast cariwans of homnibuses to riglar cab with a fast trotter,' and the latter admiring how people can trust their necks into one of 'them crazy cabs, when they can have a 'spectablce 'ackney cotche with a pair' orses as von't run away with no vun;' a consolation unquestionably founded on fact, seeing that a hackney-coach horse never was known to run at
