whistles for their baby joys. And so, by
strongholds of King Athelstane, and manors
of John of Gaunt, we reach the quaint old
town that is, alas, our journey's end; and,
never rising or falling an inch from the
perfect level, never passing through a cutting or
crossing a barren tract, without a glance at
anything unsightly, without a sound that is
not melodious, the Fairy Puff-puff goes.

THE OMNIBUS REVOLUTION.

AT last, M. Ledru Rollin is justified, and
England is in her décadence. I foresaw it, I
prophesied it, five years since;* so did Sir
Francis Head; so did Mrs. Grundy. The
French, whose "coming" (like that of the
celebrated family of Campbells, and the
anxiously-expected man, who is to keep his
long-deferred appointment with the Hour)
are come at last. Revolutionarily, it need
scarcely be said. They have a committee of
public safety sitting at four hundred and
fifty-four, West Strand. They have already
an army of upwards of one thousand men;
they have four thousand horses, an
abundantly supplied commissariat, four hundred
(omnibus) fourgons, and they have already
succeeded in exacting a weekly tribute from
the metropolitan public alone of something
very like four thousand pounds; and they
have a military chest or capital stock of eight
hundred thousand. The Revolution—a
vehicular one—has broken out. The Atlases
are in anarchy, the Swiss Cottage sacked,
the Elephant and Castle beleaguered, and the
Tricolor of France waves over the field of
Waterloo (—Busses).

These things have been seen by me, in the
flesh. I saw the conspirators in conclave some
time since; I inspected the prize models of
their anarchical carriages. I afterwards
heard seditious statistics, and administrative
treason from Sir CUSACK RONEY ;
and, finally, I heard a stout traitor (who,
previous to his renunciation of his alle-
giance and accession to the cause of
Jacobinism, had been one of the most extensive
omnibus proprietors of London) propose,
in a neat speech, " the 'elth of the osses," and
prosperity to the Franco-English company,
through whose exertions the whole omnibus
system of the empire was to be upset,
disrupted, and revolutionised.

This company (three-fourths of whose capital
being French, suggested my little preliminary
outburst of patriotism) having offered a
prize of one hundred pounds for the best model .
of an omnibus for use in London streets—
strength, lightness, economy of space, combined
with sufficiency of accommodation,
together with some elegance in design, being
the chief points insisted on—some fifty models
and drawings having been sent in for
competition; judges having been appointed, in
the persons of Mr. Godwin, the editor of the
Builder; Mr. Manby, the engineer; Mr.
Wright, the well-known Birmingham coach-builder; and as many of the representatives
of the press as could be got together, and
persuaded to forego their dearly-loved
Saturday half-holiday, having been impanelled as
a sort of unsworn jury.

Straying that way in the ceaseless going
to-and-fro, and walking up and down on the
earth, in which a conscientious Household
Words painter must necessarily pass his
existence (he has no holidays, dear reader; and
his very Sundays are given to speculations as
to how the Sabbath should most cheerfully
and rationally be spent), I found myself
ascending an ornate iron corkscrew, or
geometrical staircase, at whose summit I found
the chamber of models. I fancied, at first,
that I had mistaken my way, and wandered
into the adjacent Lowther Arcade—for the
tables were crowded with such delicate little
toy omnibuses of tin, pasteboard, and wood,
so spruce with paint, varnish, gilding, velvet
cushions, and variegated flags, that there
would have been death to the pocket in
bringing one of the more youthful
shareholders in life's company there (preference
shares they hold, and little do they care for
calls), and a revolution in the nursery had I
smuggled away one of the models in my
pocket, and brought it home to Mrs. Penn.
But some working drawings on the wall,
with hard-headed measurements and sectional
plans, soon convinced me that I had to do
with the realities of locomotion, and not
with playthings; and I devoted myself to a
careful examination of the results of the
skill and imagination of the competitive
carriage builders.

There were omnibuses of all shapes and
varieties of design. Some had single, some
double doors; some had seats placed longitudinally,
some crosswise; some were straight,
some curved. There were seats isolated by
arm-rests, like the stalls at a theatre. There
were numerous modes of disposal for the
seats on the roof—one being a boldly-
conceived notion of a circular aperture in the
roof, combining the properties of the fly-trap
and the pump-sucker, by means of which an
inside passenger might become an outside
one, ascending by a flying staircase let down
for the purpose. There was a wonderful
double-linked, octagonal affair, which a cynic
near me (there are cynics, even in the fourth
estate) declared to be a hybrid between a
washing-tub and a prisoners' van. There
were carriages with concave floors, with sky-
lights, with dead-eyes, with coach-boxes on
pivots, with staircases, with balconies, with
turnstiles (and numerous other applications
of the tell-tale principle), with any number
of wheels, with telescopic contrivances of
waterproof material removable at pleasure,
for sheltering the passengers in wet weather,
with lamp improvements, spring improvements,

* See the Foreign and Great Invasions, vol. iv., p. 60, and
vol. v., p. ti&.