began by asking him abruptly, "if he had been
to Paris?"

Heavens, what a burst of eloquence did that
singularly common-place question of mine call
forth! This little man was a sort of
conversation cask waiting to be tapped, and I had
tapped him.

"Yes, he had been to Paris. He had had a
thirty-shilling excursion ticket, and was coming
back with it, and unluckily at Amiens he had
run out to look about him a little, thinking there
was more time than there was, but the train had
gone without him, and he had been compelled
to take another ticket and come on, as his holiday
time was up, and he was obliged to be back
in London. He didn't blame anybody. It was
his own mistake, not the Frenchmen's," he said;
"catch them making a mistake!"

It was such an extraordinary thing to find an
Englishman of the class to which my new
acquaintance belonged, ready to acknowledge
merit in Frenchmen and French institutions,
that I now wished more than ever to draw
my gentleman out, and to hear what he had to
say.

"Catch them making a mistake," repeated
the little man. "I've been among 'em, now,
for handy upon a fortnight, excursioning here,
there, and everywhere, travelling in their railway
trains, riding in their 'busses, dining in their
eating-houses, visiting their Louvers, their Goblin
Tapestries, their Pally Royals, and what not,
and I never saw 'em make a mistake yet. The
managing ways of that people, the extent to
which they take you in hand—if I may so put
it—looking after you from the moment you
come—in a manner of speaking—into their
custody, till the moment you come out of it
again—is something altogether surprising and
beautiful. Not that this manner of doing
it all for you, and tackling you at every turn,
and 'you must go in here,' and 'you mustn't
go in there,' and 'you must do this,' and
'you mustn't do that,' is always what you like;
but still what I do maintain, is, that if you
do what they tell you to do, and don't what they
tell you to don't, they see that you get what
you go in for, and that you come out right side
uppermost at last."

"Then altogether," I said, " you admire their
institutions?"

"'Admire 'em!' I should think I did!
Why, look at 'em in the matter of 'busses alone.
There's a good many things in Paris that I don't
understand, and don't profess to understand;
but I do know something about the working of
a 'buss, and anything like the way they manage
their 'busses—but there! It's perfection. That's
what it is."

"You are engaged in the omnibus business
yourself?"

"Yes, sir. I'm a conductor on the Islington
and Brompton line. That's what I am. Angel,
Oxford-street, Circus, Piccadilly, Sloane-street,
Bilers, and Queen's Elm. I'm very close occupied
in a general way, but I managed to get a
holiday for a fortnight, and, having a pound or
two by me (it was left me in a small legacy,
that money was) I thought I'd spend it in
taking one of these excursion tickets to Paris
and back. The fact is," continued my friend
in the helmet-cap, confidentially, "I'd been put
upon my metal, a bit. There's a young woman
living near the 'Helm,' as nice a young woman
as you'd wish to see, and Clarissar
Armstrong by name, and it's her conduct that's
put my back up, as you may say, and been
the cause of my jining this excursion party.
'You've no conversation, George,' she says
to me one day. 'There's some people,' she
says, 'has a lot to say for themselves, and telling
you where they've been, and what they've
seen, and all the rest of it. But you don't seem
to have nothing to say about anythink.' I knew
what she meant, she was a thinking of young
Rackstraw, the greengrocer, that's who she was
thinking of. He'd been to Margate for a week,
and you'd think he'd been to Jerusalem to hear
what he had to say about it, going on as if it
was the wonderfullest journey ever made by
man. 'I'll soon cut him out,' I thinks to
myself. So the next time I saw Clarissar
Armstrong, I remarks, in a easy way, 'I'm agoing
to Paris to-morrow, and perhaps I may have
some conversation when I come back.' But I
don't know that I shall have much to say that
she'll care to hear, after all. I haven't noticed
much about the ladies' dresses, or the short
petticuts, or the bonnets and cloaks in the shop
windows, or the likes of them, my whole mind
having been bestowed, as was but natural, upon
my own subject, namely, the 'busses. And the
way them busses was officered, that is to say
driven and conducted, and worked generally.
There! Per-FECtion!

"I should say that one of those 'busses as
holds twenty-four inside, and is drawn by three
white horses screeching and yelling at the
tops of their voices all the way along the road,
would make a sensation in Brompton if
anything would. Accommodation for twelve up
each of the seats inside, and divided into
compartments, too, like armchairs, so that you
can't get squeezed; and if anybody gets in
who's several sizes too large for his seat, it's him
as must take the consequences of it and not you.
But it isn't so much the size of them 'busses
as would astonish our natives—there being
some good big 'uns among the Islington
Favourites, and also working from the Oxford-
street Circus to the station of the Metropolitan
at Portland-road. It isn't so much the size,
nor yet the compartments, nor yet the dial-plate
again the door, on which they give a stroke for
every passenger as enters the 'buss, and
which, as tending to show suspicion on the
part of the 'buss company of their servants,
I cannot approve of—it isn't so much these
things, nor yet the way in which the passengers
get in and out when the 'buss is at full trot
without stopping the vehicle—throwing themselves
back'ards when they get out, and for'ards
when they get in—it isn't any of these
things that would astonish our general 'buss