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Updated: June 26, 2025
Who can ever forget the Saturday morning at the end of term when the men "go down"? Long lines of hansoms spinning briskly toward the station, with bulging portmanteaus on the roof; the wide sunny sweep of the Broad with the 'bus trundling past Trinity gates; a knot of tall youths in the 'varsity uniform of gray "bags" and brown tweed norfolk, smoking and talking at the Balliol lodge and over it all the clang of a hundred chimes, the gray fingers of a thousand spires and pinnacles, the moist blue sky of England.... Ah, it is the palace of youth, or it was once.
The smoke of the little steamer curled and rolled over, now like a great snake, now like a great bird hovering with a snake in its talons; and the little steamer made pluckily for Blackfriars. Carts and hansoms, vans and brewers' vans, all silhouetting.
Nor can its members take ship and go home when they please. Imagine for a little, the contented frame of mind that is bred in a man by the perpetual contemplation of a harbour full of steamers as a Piccadilly cab-rank of hansoms. The weather is hot, we will suppose; something has gone wrong with his work that day, or his children are not looking so well as might be.
The letter spoke: DEAR LADY JUDGE: This is by far the hardest to write of all the letters you have had from me. For twenty-four hours I have been planning it. Last night I walked on the Embankment while the hansoms jogged by and the lights of the tramcars danced on Westminster Bridge just as the fireflies used to in the garden back of our house in Kansas. While I walked I planned.
He isn't sleeping now. It would be much nicer to walk home through Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park. She was glad that they were going to have a quiet evening. After three evenings at the play and Richard ruining himself in hansoms and not sleeping.... After this unbelievable afternoon. All those people, those terribly important people.
We took a couple of hansoms afterwards and arrived at the theatre in good time. The "Lily of Canton" went smoothly from beginning to end. The crowded house laughed and applauded the whole time. In fact, the humour and fun of Lawton's libretto were irresistible, and the beautiful airs that Viola's fancy had woven in and out to carry the wit of Lawton's sparkling lines enchanted the audience.
They are yet nearly two miles away, but already, like Niagara, thou hearest the sound thereof the fateful sound of that human Niagara, where all the great rivers of London converge: the dark, strong floods surging out from the gloomy fastnesses of the East End, the quick-running streams from the palaces of the West, the East with its wagons, the West with its hansoms, the four winds with their omnibuses, the horses and carriages under the earth jetting up their companies of grimy passengers, the very air busy with a million errands.
Beyond the spiked iron fence that enhedges the incurving drive, the roar of traffic, human, wheel and hoof, rose high for all the lateness of the hour: sidewalks groaning with the restless contact of hundreds of ill-shod feet; the roadway thundering hansoms, four-wheelers, motor-cars, dwarfed coster-mongers' donkey-carts and ponderous, rumbling, C.-P. motor-vans, struggling for place and progress.
His proper rôle in the circumstances would have been to 'jump into a hansom'; but there were no empty hansoms, and moreover, for certain reasons of finance, he had sworn off hansoms until a given date. He regarded the situation as 'rather a lark, and he somehow knew that the group understood and appreciated and perhaps resented his superior and tolerant attitude.
Numbers of hansoms and four-wheelers passed, or stood by the curb, hailing us feebly, or not even attempting to attract our attention, but every taxi seemed to have its load. At Piccadilly Circus, losing patience, we beckoned to a four-wheeler and resigned ourselves to a long, slow journey.
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