"The Diary of a Hackney Coachman" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ingraham Joseph Holt)

`I have need to do so, sir. They are my only means of getting a living!'
`You seem to have custom enough!'
`Yes, sir. I can't complain. Since I have been on this stand and had my new turn
out, I have been pretty busy. Customers, I see, always like a showy tu nout!'
`Have you been long driving?'
`About four years, sir.'
`You seem to be an educated man and to have followed a better employment.'
`This is a good one, sir. I don't find fault with it. I have been in worse
business. I was clerk in the Custom House once, but lost my situation in change
of masters; and had to put my hand to anything that was respectable. I could
have kept a hotel bar, or been chosen constable, but I am a temperance man and
don't like to sell fire-water to burn up the souls and bodies of my fellow men;
and I have some repugnance to serving writs upon poor debtors. I shouldn't sleep
sound after having put a fellow-man in jail.'
`I commend your humanity,' I said. `To be a constable a man must steel his heart
against human misery. If he is a kind man in the outset, he will soon learn
indifference to the woes of others. It is heart-hardening, soul-destroying
business, and you did well to escape it.'
`I think so, sir. Well, for want of something better I offered myself to a
stable-keeper as a driver for one of his hacks; and now, sir, I have got to own
a hack and a pair of horses for myself.'
`This fine `turn out' then really belongs to you!'
`Yes, sir, I have paid for it to the snapper on my whip lash. I have only owned
it three weeks. The morning I came to this stand was my first turn out with it.
I have had this `stand' in my eye for sometime, and I got permission of one
through the good word of the alderman, whose family I had often driven out to
occupy it. Will you ride out this morning, sir?' he asked me in the full manly
tones which characterized him.
`Yes, I will be ready at ten. Are you married?'
He blushed and then after a moment replied, with a smile,
`Not yet, sir. I expect to be in a few days!'
`I wish you joy!'
`Thank you, sir. I feel very sure of being perfectly happy!'
With these words of hope the handsome hackney coachman, who was under thirty
years of age, left me and crossed the street to his carriage.
I rode out with him daily, for a fortnight. I found him not only a careful
driver bat an intelligent guide. There was not a place of interest in or about
Boston that he was ignorant of, and which he did not stop his carriage to speak
to me through the window back of his box and point out to me.
One morning I had returned from a visit to Mount Auburn, when as he assisted me
to alight he said, with an embarrassed air and a flush that told half the story,
`Sir, if you will be so kind as to excuse me to-morrow. I shall have a friend in
my place to drive you out for the next two days!'
`Certainly. I wish you much happiness,' I said significantly.
`You have guessed it, sir. I am going to be married in the morning and shall
take a little trip down into the country for a day or two.'
`Where shall you live when you return?'
`With my wife's mother. She has a small, neat house in Bedford street, and as it
is all furnished and Betsy is her only daughter, why I have promised to live
with her; but I shall keep up the house you know, sir, just as if I was at