From midnight to daylight the taxicabs by the countless swarm will be charging about in every direction—­charging, moreover, at the rate of eight pence a mile.  Think that over, ye taxitaxed wretches of New York, and rend your garments, with lamentations loud!  There is this also to be said of the London taxi service—­and to an American it is one of the abiding marvels of the place—­that, no matter where you go, no matter how late the hour or how outlying and obscure the district, there is always a trim taxicab just round the next corner waiting to come instantly at your whistle, and with it a beggar with a bleak, hopeless face, to open the cab door for you and stand, hat in hand, for the penny you toss him.

In the main centers, such as Oxford Circus and Piccadilly Circus and Charing Cross, and along the Embankment, the Strand and Pall Mall, they are as thick as fleas on the Missouri houn’ dawg famous in song and story—­the taxis, I mean, though the beggars are reasonably thick also—­and they hop like fleas, bearing you swiftly and surely and cheaply on your way.  The meters are honest, openfaced meters; and the drivers ask no more than their legal fares and are satisfied with tips within reason.  Here in America we have the kindred arts of taxidermy and taxicabbery; one of these is the art of skinning animals and the other is the art of skinning people.  The ruthless taxirobber of New York would not last half an hour in London; for him the jail doors would yawn.

Oldtime Londoners deplored the coming of the taxicab and the motorbus, for their coming meant the entire extinction of the driver of the horse-drawn bus, who was an institution, and the practical extinction of the hansom cabby, who was a type and very frequently a humorist too.  But an American finds no fault with the present arrangement; he is amply satisfied with it.

Personally I can think of no more exciting phase of the night life of the two greatest cities of Europe than the stunt of dodging taxicabs.  In London the peril that lurks for you at every turning is not the result of carelessness on the part of the drivers; it is due to the rules of the road.  Afoot, an Englishman meeting you on the sidewalk turns, as we do, to the right hand; but mounted he turns to the left.  The foot passenger’s prerogative of turning to the right was one of the priceless heritages wrested from King John by the barons at Runnymede; but when William the Conqueror rode into the Battle of Hastings he rode a left-handed horse—­and so, very naturally and very properly, everything on hoof or wheel in England has consistently turned to the left ever since.  I took some pains to look up the original precedents for these facts and to establish them historically.

The system suits the English mind, but it is highly confusing to an American who gets into the swirl of traffic at a crossing—­and every London crossing is a swirl of traffic most of the time—­and looks left when he should look right, and looks right when he should be looking left until the very best he can expect, if he survive at all, is cross-eyes and nervous prostration.