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The coachman, who grumbled that his 'osses should be brought out and his carriage made into an hospital for that old feller and Mrs. O., drove her with the utmost alacrity now, and trembling lest he should be superseded by Mr. Osborne's coachman, asked "what them there Russell Square coachmen knew about town, and whether they was fit to sit on a box before a lady?"
"I have been much abroad; I have mingled, I trust, in good, which is to say, Christian society: and I must say, that few things struck me more upon my return than that the ladies who drive very handsome carriages, with footmen, etc., in livery, should permit such thin coachmen upon the box. I really believe that Mrs.
Right and left of the steps conducting to the rooms of the Pope and the Cardinal Secretary of State four or five carriages were ranged, the coachmen stiffly erect and the horses motionless in the brilliant light; and nothing else peopled that vast square desert of a court which, with its bareness gilded by the coruscations of its glass-work and the ruddiness of its stones, suggested a pagan temple dedicated to the sun.
They all came to a standstill, as Mrs. Scobel had prophesied. For a quarter of an hour there was no progress whatever, and a good deal of recrimination among coachmen, and then the rest of the journey had to be done at a walking pace.
The reader will remember how, having first elucidated the part which exceptional mental faculties, concentrated on the direction of labour, and here called ability, play in modern production, I proceeded to the question of the means by which this direction is accomplished, and showed that these were supplied by the possession of wage-capital capitalism thus representing no mere passive monopoly, but a system of reins which are attached to innumerable horses, and are useless except as vehicles of the skill with which the coachmen handle them.
Penalties of ten, twenty, and thirty pounds, are mercilessly imposed upon coach proprietors who shall run their coaches on the Sabbath; one, two, and ten pounds upon those who hire, or let to hire, horses and carriages upon the Lord's day, but not one syllable about those who have no necessity to hire, because they have carriages and horses of their own; not one word of a penalty on liveried coachmen and footmen.
Many were even hired by their former masters and paid for the work they formerly did without pay under slavery. I remember Bill Read and Dave Lowe. They had been coachmen before freedom. By combining their first savings, they bought a hack, as it was called. It was more of a cab. For all those who did not have private conveyances, this was the only way of getting about town.
Houston, said little for the out-door part of the arrangements. Coachmen are nowhere a particularly silent and civil class; but the uncouth European peasants, who have been preferred to the honours of the whip in New-York, to the usual feelings of competition and contention, added that particular feature of humility which is known to distinguish "the beggar on horseback."
All the coachmen know me here, and I them. I've driven alone dozens of times. Good-night. Good-night, Mr. Crayford." She almost pushed Alston out of the carriage in her excitement. She was now burning with impatience to be with Claude. "Good-night, good-night!" she called, waving her hands as the horses moved forward. "She's a oner," said Crayford.
"Well," said I, "I have been called a lord in my time." "It must have been by a thimble-rigger, then," said the coachman, bending back, and half-turning his face round with a broad leer. "You have hit the mark wonderfully," said I. "You coachmen, whatever else you may be, are certainly no fools." "We a'n't, a'n't we?" said the coachman.
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