Of all the cabriolet-drivers whom we have ever had the honour and gratification of knowing by sight--and our acquaintance in this way has been most extensive--there is one who made an impression on our mind which can never be effaced, and who awakened in our bosom a feeling of admiration and respect, which we entertain a fatal presentiment will never be called forth again by any human being.

He was a man of most simple and prepossessing appearance.

He was a brown-whiskered, white-hatted, no-coated cabman; his nose was generally red, and his bright blue eye not unfrequently stood out in bold relief against a black border of artificial workmanship; his boots were of the Wellington form, pulled up to meet his corduroy knee-smalls, or at least to approach as near them as their dimensions would admit of; and his neck was usually garnished with a bright yellow handkerchief.

In summer he carried in his mouth a flower; in winter, a straw--slight, but, to a contemplative mind, certain indications of a love of nature, and a taste for botany.
His cabriolet was gorgeously painted--a bright red; and wherever we went, City or West End, Paddington or Holloway, North, East, West, or South, there was the red cab, bumping up against the posts at the street corners, and turning in and out, among hackney-coaches, and drays, and carts, and waggons, and omnibuses, and contriving by some strange means or other, to get out of places which no other vehicle but the red cab could ever by any possibility have contrived to get into at all.

Our fondness for that red cab was unbounded.